Poster Presentation 32 — Where in the Paradigm Are We? Designing an Affective Instrument to Gauge Practitioner and Researcher Beliefs About Gifted Education — Talbot S. Hook
Monday, May 20, 2024, 5:00 – 7:00 pm, Student Union Ballroom, Rooms 330/331
Gifted education has gone through several paradigm shifts in its more than a century of history. What started as an investigation of human genius and the nature of intelligence slowly broadened into a curiosity about multiple conceptions of giftedness and their corresponding educational implications. So where do our current beliefs put us on the paradigm landscape? Is gifted education still focused on finding and serving children with innate gifts and talents, or should it best be viewed as a set of educational practices that can benefit all students? Is giftedness innate, developmental, contextual? Does our field even require the gifted label? In an effort to discern whether researchers and teachers are working within differing paradigms, I created a self-report affective instrument to gauge beliefs about giftedness, gifted students, and gifted education. This poster presents information about the instrument as well as some of my initial findings.