There is an increasing awareness that gifted children have much potential that remains untapped. It is only by giving them an education that is commensurate with their abilities that such potential can be more fully developed. Prof. David Chan of the Department of Educational Psychology embarked on a two-year project with some HK$460,000 from the Research Grants Council in November 1997, to study the educational and emotional needs of gifted students in Hong Kong.

Gifted Students Nominated by Principals and Teachers

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The 383 gifted students participating in the study were not selected through traditional intelligence tests (popularly known as IQ tests) or other standardized psychological tests. The researchers believe that these instruments may not be able to effectively assess different talents. They instead invited teachers and principals of local secondary schools to nominate students aged 12 to 19 with outstanding academic performance, creativity, leadership, or potential in other areas such as sports and the arts.

Questionnaire Survey

To understand the learning styles, self-image, psychological health, and problem-solving skills of these students, and their adjustment to being gifted, the researchers asked them to complete a series of questionnaires. The objective is to find out what they consider to be their preferred ways of learning, how they perceive their academic and social needs, what pressures they feel they are subject to, and ways of dealing with such pressures. The researchers also divided the participants into groups based on their scores on intelligence, creativity, and motivation, for group comparisons of their educational and emotional needs. Sixty students were subsequently selected for individual interviews to gather more detailed information about their daily lives, school lives, and how they solve problems.

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Learning Styles

The results show that the preferred learning styles among gifted students are discussion, classroom lecture, peer instruction, projects, games, independent study, simulation. The least preferred styles are drilling and recitation. The more motivated students are more likely to adopt different styles of learning than the less motivated ones. Generally speaking, gifted students share many similarities with other academically high achieving students: they have a fondness for verbally interactive teaching activities, and dislike structured, teacher-directed activities that involve drilling and recitation.

Classroom lecture is one of the preferred learning styles of gifted students

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Emotional Characteristics

Gifted students report good emotional adjustment. They regard themselves as academic achievers who behave well, get along well with others, and have good friends. They believe their weaknesses lie in sports, finding and keeping jobs, and attracting the opposite sex. They easily get worked up over things that happen around them and they feel schoolwork is unchallenging.

Analysing the participants' perceptions of being gifted and their self-perceptions, the researchers found that the more intelligent students tend to believe they have greater difficulty making friends. They are also more critical of themselves, and more likely to feel they are different from their friends due to their outstanding abilities. These factors lead to a poor self-assessment of their interpersonal relationships.

The results also show that parents have higher expectations of sons than of daughters, and that the more creative students and more able student leaders report more emotional problems with strong feelings and intense involvement, while less able student leaders show more concern for interpersonal problems and gaining recognition.

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Heterogeneous Needs

An often neglected fact highlighted by the study is that gifted children do not come from a homogeneous group. For instance, the participants can be classified into three groups according to their self-perceptions. The first is the 'modest group' of students who have lower self-regard in many domains, except in their abilities in sports activities. They are mostly older, more intelligent students who do not consider themselves gifted. Most express problems in making friends.

The second group of students are the 'superstars' who are very confident in every domain. They are most confident of their leadership abilities.

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The third group of students are the 'stereotyped gifted'. They fall between the first two groups in their self-perceptions, and fit well into stereotypes of the gifted.

Different views will lead to different categorizations based on different sets of data. The above categorization serves to emphasize the heterogeneous needs of gifted children. More attention should therefore be given to this diversity of needs when designing a curriculum for them. This study is immensely helpful for the development of appropriate gifted programmes to help gifted children handle problems in their daily lives.

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On the whole, the gifted sample in the study demonstrates good educational and emotional adjustment. But do the findings apply only to students who are gifted in their teachers' eyes? Prof. Chan admits that there are still many unanswered questions about giftedness, including the popular issue of nature versus nurture. However the aim of the study is not to find out whether children are born with certain talents, but to identify ways to fully develop talents that children have, ways that are compatible with Hong Kong's specific cultural setting. Not only do we need to ponder how to define and identify 'giftedness', but we also need to explore issues such as how to design the right programmes and engage in research that informs practice, as well as how to provide funding and education for teachers of gifted learners.