Gifted students' perception of special courses. (On-going Topics).

Abstract

In Salzburg, for many years, special courses have been offered to students who are particularly gifted. In an evaluation, the students reported their perceptions of the learning situation on a lesson-to-lesson base with the so-called lesson-interruption method and in a summative questionnaire at the end of the school year. Selected results of this study are reported, dealing with situation specificity of teaching, interest of the students, demands and student independence in the lessons. The results show, among others, that the teaching is less situation specific, less demanding, and more direct than assumed. Further, interest seems to be a very important parameter even with students who are very interested anyway. Some conclusions are drawn.

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How do gifted students perceive the special courses they follow because they are particularly interested in the topic? This was the general question addressed when we were asked to do an evaluation of the so-called Plus-courses, a set of enrichment courses offered to gifted students of 16 years and above in Salzburg. The courses have been offered since 1987; the selected students from different schools all over the Austrian Bundesland Salzburg join a course with two weekly hours on a special topic. There is no admission test, but the courses are known for challenging new experiences beyond the daily routine; students who show high performances in the regular lessons are nominated by their teachers to attend these special courses. In the academic year 1999-2000 the courses were evaluated for the first time. The aim of the present study was to collect information about the courses and how the teaching was perceived by the students.

To answer the evaluation question, we used several instruments; in the present paper, we report the results of assessments which can be seen as alternative or at least as a complement to the traditional assessments of the students' perceptions of teaching.

The traditional approach for such assessments is to use questionnaires with very general statements like "The teacher is not very strict" (Moos, 1974). However, teachers claim that they teach very situation specifically (see Patry, 1995a), so they may be strict in some lessons (or even parts of the lessons) and not strict at all in other lessons (or parts of lessons) -- and this is what research results show (Patry, 1995b). Hence, it becomes problematic to know what actually the students report when they say that a given teacher is strict: whether it is the last experience with this teacher, or the average over the lessons of the last week, or of the last month, or of the last year.

In contrast, we used the so-called "lesson interruption method" (Patty, 1997) which allows the assessment on a on a lesson-to-lesson basis: The students answer questions of the kind mentioned above; however, the context or situation to which the statements apply are given with high precision, stating, for instance, "in the last 15 minutes the teacher was very strict". This can be done several times (usually not within the same lesson, though), and after some experience the students can answer very quickly and the lesson is not disturbed: The teacher can continue without any problem where he or she stopped before the assessment. This instrument can be used to assess any construct that is typically investigated in the traditional global classroom atmosphere studies, yet it is by far more precise and sensitive to changes. In previous studies, significant differences between lessons within the same teacher teaching the same topic to the same class were found in most cases (Patry, 1997) or in almost half of the cases (Patry, Schwetz & Gastager, 2000:79 significant differences with p<.05 out of 163). Do to space restrictions we cannot give details in this regard; a theory that can explain these findings is provided by Patry (1992). Such situation specificity jeopardizes assessments of teaching if the situations are not accounted for: One does not know what the assessment is representative for, i.e., the validity of the assessments must be questioned, and this "decontextualization" of research on teaching may be one reason for the "latent crisis" of research on teaching (Helmke & Weinert, 1997, pp. 73 and 137ff). Many theories on teaching could benefit from including situational aspects, which in turn requires situational specific assessments. In this context one can also argue that situation specificity in teaching is appropriate, i.e., that it is more effective than nonspecific teaching (see, for instance, Hunt, 1976).

Theoretical background

The concept of giftedness on which the selection of the participating students is based (nomination by teachers) is very closely related to school standards and grades. The three factor conception of giftedness (Renzulli, 1986) involves above average general ability, task commitment and creativity; for the Plus-courses it can be claimed that the first two factors are met, whereas the third one (creativity) is not explicitly involved.

The conception of this enrichment program follows Gagnes (1993, 2000) model of giftedness and talent, which specifies that the emergence of a particular talent results from the application of one or more aptitudes to the mastery of knowledge and skills in that particular field, mediated by the support of intrapersonal and environmental catalysts, as well as through systematic learning and extensive practice. According to Sternberg (1993) giftedness means to satisfy five criteria: excellence, rarity, productivity, demonstrability and value. For the Plus-courses the nurture of talent with respect to four of them (all except rarity) can be claimed.

A meta analysis (Hany, 2000) shows that such enrichment programs have strong effects on cognitive, creative and affective student variables. The programs are more flexible, and for an optimal success they should differ from regular school programs with regard to content, demands and learning conditions such as student independence as opposed to the dependence on direct teaching (Southern et al., 1993). The latter is the case for the Plus-courses, as the evaluation results reported elsewhere (Patry et al., 2001) show.

The evaluation of programs for gifted students is one of the most neglected areas in the domain of the education of gifted children (Callahan, 1993) because of various factors unique to the gifted (Carter, 1991). Among others, the group homogeneity concerning the level of ability is assumed to have an influence on program effects (Heller 2000) -- in the Plus-courses, this condition is satisfied through the process of the selection of the participants. Evaluation of programs for the gifted usually focus on broad outcomes, but they also deal with the measurement of student outcomes (an overview is given by Canahan, 2000), for example student satisfaction with the program or on the impact on the self-concept (Coleman & Fults, 1983; Clark & Dixon, 1997; Colangelo & Assouline, 2000). Further aspects are the interactions of aptitude and instruction, which are assumed to be important for the clear identification of program effects (Callahan 1993; Heller 2000); while the achievements were not assessed, all other issues are addressed in the evaluation of the Plus-courses, and the results of these global assessments are reported in Patry et al. (2001). In contrast, the present study will focus on a micro-analysis of the teaching process as reported by the students.

Hypotheses

The following hypotheses were tested:

Hypothesis 1: In special courses for gifted students, teaching is just as situation specific as in regular classes mentioned above.

Hypothesis 2: The students like the teaching practices more if they are more interested in the topic. We want to see whether there are differences between different courses with regard to interest. Further, for dimensions like "locus of control" and "understandability", which are directly related to the content in which the students are interested, we assume also a positive relationship with interest.

Hypothesis 3: Teaching is challenging for the students. The organizers of the Plus-courses claim that the ambitions in these courses are higher than in regular classes. (3a) We assume that the students report that the demands are rather high, but that they are quite satisfied with the demands. (3b) We assume also, however, that there are differences between courses with respect to the demands.

Hypothesis 4: It deals with independence in the students' work; it is divided into two partial hypotheses: (4a) Within the courses independent work is promoted. This is assumed because the students have good achievements in the topic (otherwise they would not have been selected for the course) and are motivated; many teachers regard this as a precondition for shifting over to the students responsibility for their own learning. Further, as stated above, this is part of the concept of enrichment programs. (4b) However, we assume also that independence is different from course to course.

Procedure

Thirteen courses with 11 teachers were used in the study; the topics of the courses were languages (Japanese, Spanish, and Italian, the latter with a beginners and a advanced course), stock exchange (one beginners and one advanced course), arts (musical dance, design, film, photography, multimedia, festivals), and science (astronomy), with between 6 and 16 students (maximum number of students responding at one of the several occasions within one course). The teacher collected the answer sheets, and because of the required anonymity of the participating students (the teacher should not be able to recognize the students), we could not record their names, and an attempt to use codes instead failed because the students forgot the codes and in some courses the same code was used by several students; hence it is not possible to link the assessments at different times with individual students, which means that across occasions no correlations or repeated measures comparisons could be done. The total number of participating students was about 139; because the students could not be identified individually, we could not check whether always the same students were present, so the number of individuals is only an approximation. Further, students missed assessments in an uncontrollable degree, and finally there were missings in the response sheets. Therefore the number of assessments varies from variable to variable; we will always indicate the number of students on which any result is based. In some courses, the assessment was done only three times, in others it was more often, up to nine times over a period of about three months. The questionnaire addressed the following constructs:

() Demands (excessive vs. too easy);

() Interest: Content;

() Independence;

() Locus of Control;

() Understandability.

Each construct was represented by three Likert-type items (with five response levels), of which the average was calculated. The items were presented in a random order. It included some additional constructs which will not be dealt with here because of low reliability (Cronbach alpha<.57), namely Interest (commitment; alpha=.38) and Cooperation among students (alpha=.47); in further evaluation studies these scales will be improved.

For each of the constructs (except for Interest), to each of the items dealing with the construct (which is called "regular" dimension) an item of the type "I liked/disliked this" was used (called "Liking" dimension). For instance, after the regular item "In this unit I felt that the tasks were too difficult / too easy. "(from the construct Demands) the students responded to the Liking item "I liked / disliked the task difficulty." (construct Liking Demands). The reason for this was that a student might feel, for instance, that the Demands are very high ("too difficult") but also feels comfortable with this ("I liked it"). For Interest the "liked" questions were omitted because it is assumed that if the students judge the lesson as interesting they also liked it in this regard.

Three of the constructs discussed here were compulsory (Demands; Liking Demands; Interest: Content) and two constructs with the corresponding Liking dimensions were optional: The teachers could choose which two optional constructs they wanted to use (one teacher chose only one additional construct, some teachers chose constructs which are not discussed here).

Results

For each course and each available construct, a time series of the judgments averaged over the students was calculated. With these data autocorrelations were computed to test for sequential effects; in no case a significant autocorrelation coefficient was found; this is in agreement with other studies, and there is no theoretical reason to assume substantial autocorrelations with a time lag of one week or more. Hence, independence of the assessment occasions was assumed.

Ad hypothesis 1: Of the 126 analyses of variance that could be calculated (one for each construct in each course), 20 showed significant differences between the different occasions (p<.05) and 8 showed a tendency (.1>p>.05); the majority showed no significant differences (p>.10). This means that differences between the occasions within the courses, as judged by the students, are rare in this population. Obviously the first hypothesis, dealing with situation specificity, is refuted for the majority of the teachers and parameters.

To test the further hypotheses, each assessment at each opportunity was taken as an independent measure, despite the fact that most students had several reports on different opportunities. This is legitimate because experience shows that the students are well able to judge each occasion by itself, i.e., we never found a serial dependency of the assessments (Patty, 1997). But to remain on the conservative side, the significance level is fixed at .001.

Hypothesis 2 relates to the importance of Interest. The results for the different courses are given in the corresponding column in table 1. Not surprisingly, the students are generally highly interested in the course topics. Despite this high level, but in accordance with the hypothesis, however, there are significant differences between the courses (ANOVA, p<.001, [eta.sup.2] = .124; [eta.sup.2] indicates the percentage of variance accounted for by the respective factors). These differences are not so systematic that one could draw any conclusion, though, maybe with the following exception: In both cases where a course for beginners and a course for advanced students were given, the latter yielded less Interest than the former (p<.001, [eta.sup.2] = .072); the sample of courses is too small, however, to go beyond saying that this needs further analysis. Table One. See issue's website <http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/failp.htm>.

The relationship between Interest and the other variables can be analyzed through correlations. In table 2, the correlations of Interest with the other variables are presented. As can be seen, all dimensions except for Demands correlate positively and significantly with Interest. Particularly the correlations of Interest with the Liking dimensions and with Understandability and Locus of Control are quite high; this is in agreement with hypothesis 2. See issue's website <http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/fallp.htm>.

For hypotheses 3 and 4 (parts a) one can compare the overall average with the theoretical average, which in this particular case is 3. These theoretical averages make sense for bipolar scales where the theoretical average means that neither of the poles is dominant.

The test of hypothesis 3 is based on the use of the scale Demands and its satisfaction complement Liking Demands; in the former the theoretical average of 3 means that the course Demands are neither too high nor too low. The empirical average is 2.86 (SD=.70), which is slightly lower than the theoretical average. This indicates that overall the courses are slightly too easy, which refutes hypothesis 3a. However, the Demands vary much between courses (hypothesis 3b), as can be seen in table 1 and is confirmed by the analysis of variance with the factor "course" (p<.001; [eta.sup.2] = .103): Some courses (e.g., courses 3 and 12) have high Demands, whereas others (e.g., course 15) seems to be low in Demands. Satisfaction with the Demands is high in general (average 4.18, SD=.84) and also shows differences between courses (p<.001; [eta.sup.2] = .177). One cannot say that the less the Demands, the higher the satisfaction with the Demands: The overall correlation between Demands and Liking Demands is about zero (rho=.064 with N=596); this means that those students who think the lesson is less demanding do not like the demands better. This is also true within the single lessons: The 70 correlations between Demands and Liking Demands within single lessons have an average of -.09 (SD=-43); although there is a slight tendency for negative correlations, overall no relationship can be found. As reported above (see also table 2), while Demands are not related to the Interest, the Liking of the Demands is indeed.

To test hypothesis 4, we use the dimension Independence and the corresponding dimension Liking Independence. The theoretical average is 3; the empirical average over all courses over the occasions for Independence was 3.07 (SD=.98), i.e. almost exactly on the theoretical mean. Therefore, we must question hypothesis 4a which states that the degree of Independence is high. This does not mean, however, that the students are not satisfied with the Independence since the average of Liking Independence is 3.92 (SD-.85), which is clearly above the theoretical mean.

As to hypothesis 4b, it turns out that there are important differences between the courses both with regard to Independence (p<.001, [eta.sup.2] = .160) and with regard to Liking Independence (p<.001, [eta.sup.2] = .252) (see table 1 for the values); however, no systematic effect related, e.g., with the topic of the courses could be found. Overall, the correlation between Independence and Liking Independence is rho=.469 (N=266, p<.001), which indicates that the higher the Independence is, the higher the students appreciate the approach.

Discussion

The first hypothesis dealing with situation specificity is refuted. It remains to be seen if this result is confirmed in the replication study which is now underway. One might speculate about possible reasons for this surprising result. One reason that has been put forward to account for situation specificity (see Patry, 1991) is that the heterogeneity of the student population makes it necessary to teach in a situation specific way --and it is possible that the higher homogeneity of the students yields less situation specificity practiced by the teachers. The ATI research (Cronbach & Snow, 1981; Snow & Swanson, 1992) has shown that some students (with specific aptitudes) learn better with some teaching means (e.g., direct teaching) whereas others (with other aptitudes) benefit more from other approaches (e.g., self-directed learning). Probably in some situations the teacher will adapt to the students with one aptitude, in others to those with other aptitudes (Corno & Snow, 1986), and hence will behave situation specifically overall. One can assume, however, that the students of the Plus-courses are homogeneous in their aptitudes -- or at least more homogeneous than the regular courses, since they were selected for the courses based on ability and interest, two of the most important aptitudes -- and that therefore the teachers do not feel the necessity to adapt their teaching to different student aptitudes.

On the other hand, Heller (2000) has insisted in the importance of applying the ATI concept with gifted students, too. This might mean that the teachers in the Plus-courses could improve their efficacy if they would teach more situation specificly, be more adaptive to the students' needs (which may differ from student to student), and the like. It seems that here there is considerable potential for future teaching.

The results of the testing of hypothesis 2 show the importance of Interest. This result is particularly remarkable because we have a ceiling effect, with almost 41% of the students having the highest possible value (5) and 82% having a value of 4 or more. This confirms that the students are highly interested. For the statistical analysis, however, such distributions have the consequence to lower the correlation coefficients. But even among highly interested students Interest is related to the all Liking variables -- the more the students are interested in the topic, the more they like the approach -- as well as to some content variables such as Understandability. Since we have correlations, one cannot say which of the variables comes first, whether Interest increases Understandability, for instance, or on the contrary Understandability increases Interest. For this an experimental design would have to be used.

The judgment of the teaching (Liking) by the students seems to be strongly biased by their Interest in the topic. The description of the teaching itself (regular dimension) is affected by Interest only if content is involved in some way in the regular dimension -- and here it makes sense to think that the more interested a student is in the subject matter, the more will he or she understand, and vice versa, etc.

In contrast to hypothesis 3a, it seems that the students do not perceive the courses as very demanding. Since we cannot compare with their experience in regular schools, we cannot say whether the courses are more difficult than the latter (research in this regard is underway). We can say, however, that the students in these challenging courses are quite able to manage the Demands and are quite satisfied with the requirements.

In regular schools, one would expect that the less the Demands (provided that the Demands are not too low), the higher the satisfaction with them (Liking Demands). This is not the case in the Plus-courses. This might be due to the fact that the students here are more interested in the respective contents than regular students; highly demanding lessons might then satisfy this interest and compensate for any inconvenience highly demanding tasks may create. In average, students with high task commitment (one factor of Renzulli's, 1986, conceptualization of "giftedness") do not mind challenging tasks, but they do not particularly value them.

In hypothesis 4 we assumed that Independence is fairly high. This was not confirmed: Obviously it would be possible for the teachers to shift over to the students even more responsibility than they have done until now. This result is in agreement with the result of the test of hypothesis 1: If the teacher shifts over responsibility to the students, the teaching itself will necessarily become more situation specific. Whether teachers should do it is a question of didactics. The students are quite happy with the amount of Independence, but one might ask whether more Independence would not increase the effectiveness of teaching. And the results show that the higher the Independence is, the more are the students satisfied with it -- increasing the Independence could then be a contribution to student motivation, too. In the pres??ent study we could not (and did not want to) assess the increase in achievement of the students so that we cannot say which didactical approach is most effective. Following a constructivist teaching concept (cf., e.g., Steffe & Gale, 1995), however, one would assume that more Independence could be quite beneficial.

The lesson interruption method which was used here, hence, has been very useful.: It is a very precise instrument to get to know the students' perception and judgments. The results show that the students are very well able to discriminate between different characteristics of the teaching situation -- we could not find a halo effect. They also make a difference between the description of the characteristics (regular dimensions) and values judgments (Liking) about these characteristics. The results of the assessments seem to be quite valid, the "regular" dimension representing what indeed happens in the school and the Liking dimensions representing the students' reactions to this. One can conclude from this that they can be used to assess teaching on a lesson-to-lesson base. The usefulness of the lesson interruption method for context-bound educational research was confirmed, and its further use might contribute to reduce the "latent crisis" of teaching research mentioned above.

The method also provided some hints how teaching effectiveness can be increased. For instance, the lack of adaptiveness (situation specificity) and the Independence which was lower than expected are quite striking. Based on the previous research and theories on teaching (e.g., constructivism) and on studies on the gifted (particularly the claim for ATI) one can say that there is some potential to increase the teaching effectiveness in this particular population by optimizing these variables.

The teachers got a written feedback containing their individual results and some brief comments, mainly on the descriptive level. Since the evaluation was a pilot study and there is little research on the evaluation of courses for gifted children, we did not want to go suggest changes before we know exactly what is the case. Currently we are doing a replication of the study with improved assessment tools; if the results are confirmed, we will give some recommendations to the teachers, some of which might be: Do not hesitate to give demanding assignments, but make sure that interest is high and leave the students as much independence as you can, which means to adapt teaching more than previously to the individual students' needs.

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Jean-Luc Patry, University of Salzburg, Austria Sieglinde Weyringer, Center for Research and Promotion of Gifted Children, Salzburg Gunter Wageneder, Center for Research and Promotion of Gifted Children, Salzburg

Jean-Luc is professor of education and head of the Institute of Education. He was awarded the Doctor of Science Degree by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. His research interests are in situation specificity, teacher- student-interaction, and evaluation research. Sieglinde holds an ECHA diploma. She is teacher and counselor at the Center for Research and Promotion of Gifted Children, where she works with elementary school children. She has publications on situation specificity and on gifted children. Gunter has a diploma in education at the University of Salzburg and works at the Center for Research and Promotion of Gifted Children. His main interests are in evaluation and evaluation research.