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THE INTEGRATIVE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH TO GIFTED AND TALENTED STUDENTS THROUGH THE RECOGNISION AND DEVELOPMENT THEIR LEARNING STYLES
Anna Tatarinceva,
Marina Marchenoka
Abstract
The research is dedicated to the interdependence between the gifted and talented student’s development and their learning style. The authors suggest the given approach to the development of gifted and talented students in order the educators of the gifted and talented to understand and recognize the need to provide special education for such students, and tools which help to meet this formidable challenge. The authors investigate different definitions of learning styles, giftedness and talent, various approaches to the development of gifted and talented students in the areas of studying the languages and music, give recommendations for the systematic development of gifted and talented students through their learning styles.
The process of customizing education for the gifted is accomplished by differentiating the curriculum, individualizing the instructional process and developing a creative supportive learning environment.
Key words: ability, language, learning, development, musicality, creativity, giftedness, talent, individualization, approach, instruction, learning style, achievement, success.
Introduction
The research is necessitated because of some problems existing in the educational process nowadays. The first PROBLEM is that the educational literature devotes so little attention to the gifted and talented students, their problems, uniqueness and a special approach to learning.
The second PROBLEM is that the recent researches connected with many problems in the educational process don’t reach many of our teachers. The third and maybe the main PROBLEM is the necessity to take into account the individual style of talented and gifted students in the conditions of the frontal form of work in our educational establishments.
The authors believe that individual learning style is one of the most important factors of students’ achievements in different areas of learning, which is untrue to the possibility of individualizing the learning process.
The AIM of the research is to investigate pedagogical and psychological literature connected with the problem of the gifted and
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talented students and to give recommendation of the development of the gifted and talented through their learning style in educational process.
The METHOD of the research is the theoretical analysis of scientific literature on the given problem.
The Uniqueness of the Gifted and Talented Students
We can see the paradigm shift existing in modern education. Such a paradigm clearly defines what is real and what cannot be real in a given culture in a real state. This paradigm turns us, teachers, face to face to our students, it presents us a new understanding of human intelligence and learning, especially, learning a second language, and appreciates each learner as a unique human being with her/his individuality, the potential, abilities, skills, habits, talent, preferences, learning styles.
Therefore instructions and testing must be individualized and varied. The authors believe that the human factor holds the key to an accurate assessment process.
For the authors’ mind, teaching students how to learn, think, to be intelligent in as many ways as possible, to implement his/her own preferable style of learning to reach success in their learning is the main goal of education.
The authors investigate the problem of the gifted and talented students in areas of learning the languages and music, because, from the authors’ experience of teaching the English language and music, those students who have the musical abilities are always successful in learning a language.
Teachers, if they want to be successful in their interaction with the students during the educational process, should use the humanistic approach in order to understand human development, which takes into account:
• individual needs and goals,
• differences,
• cognitive,
• physical,
• psychological factors,
where a student’s understanding of Self and the world around him/her is transformed, expanded, questioned, deepened, upset, stretched, and so on.
Theoreticians and educators have developed many effective approaches and innovative materials in a variety of subject matter areas. In many instances, unfortunately, well-established research findings and
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reports of highly successful, innovative advances in teaching strategies and curriculum materials fail to react those actively engaged in teaching the gifted students. By the same token, researchers rarely consider knowledge and experience gleaned from the field.
Many important issues associated with teaching the gifted and talented students are raised and discussed in depth. The only thing all educators in this area agree with each other and it is uncontestable - the uniqueness of the talented and gifted students in our modern education.
These students love to study languages, literature, art, music. They are dreamers and are very sensitive to sounds in the environment; the chirp of a cricket, rain on the roof, varying traffic patterns. They study languages, literature and art better with music in the background. They can often reproduce any new foreign word and a melody after hearing it only once.
Various sounds, tones, and rhythms may have a visible effect on them (that is, you can see a change in facial expressions, body movement, or emotional responses during your musical and English lessons). They enjoy creating new different foreign language items, singing and listening. They are very often quite skilled at mimicking sounds, languages, language accents, and other speech patterns, recognizing different musical instruments in a composition.
There is a greater tolerance for the separation of the gifted or talented student from the rest of the students in the visual and performing arts than in any other dimension of education. But let’s analyze the educational process in our public schools and its attitude to the gifted and talented students.
It has been said that the public schools are a mirror of our society. The attitude of the public schools in our society is that the visual and performing arts are an extra, a sideline, not truly a part of "basic” education, and this probably accurately reflects the view of the larger society as well. Those who are the extraordinarily talented and gifted in these areas have a difficult road ahead of them in terms of not only their acceptance in school but, more important, their acceptance in the adult world afterward.
As Gardner (1961) put it, "Even in the case of genuinely important gifts - the gifts of an artist, writer, composer, linguist, architect, or sculptor -the individual can never assume that society will support him in the exercise of his talent. Talent is one thing and the marketability of talent is something else”. A contemporary teacher in musical and English classes faced with overwhelming daily pressures, is hard pressed to gain a perspective on the problems of the gifted children and is eagerly seeking
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specific guidance. Often justifiably impatient with esoteric discussions about the definition, the teacher and others in our society fail to recognize that the definition of giftedness is bound to the culture.
Each culture appears to feature the type of giftedness that it rewards or values. The ancient Greeks produced orators, the Romans followed them produced engineers, the Renaissance - artists of sixteenth-century Italy, the Germany - composers of the seventeenth century, and Great Britain - English writers of the nineteenth century, who illustrate the emergence of talent that is specially rewarded in a particular culture at a particular time.
Torrance (1999) pointed out sharp contrasts in the styles of learning of Japanese and United States students, with the emphasis in the Western world being placed on logic and intelligence, and in the Eastern world upon intuition and imagination. As we view the differing talents that emerge from cultures with differing values, we in fact may be observing the remarkable adaptability of the human intellect. The meaning of giftedness is a topic of continuing discussions. There are many versions of a definition of the gifted and giftedness in the educational literature, and the one that follows, is known widely as the Marland's (1972) classical definition, it reflects the current concern with a variety of the dimension of giftedness:
“The gifted and talented students are those identified by professionally qualified persons who by virtue of outstanding abilities are capable of high performance. These are persons who require differentiated educational programs and services beyond those normally provided by the regular school program in order to realize their contribution to self and society".
Students capable of high performance include those with demonstrated achievements and or potential ability in any of the following areas:
♦ General intellectual aptitude;
♦ Specific academic aptitude;
♦ Creative or productive thinking;
♦ Leadership ability;
♦ Visual and performing arts (Milgram, 1993)
With the prestige of federal law behind it, Marland’s (1972) omnibus definition of giftedness became widely accepted. By 1980, 39 states had enacted legislation based upon this definition. The authors would like to pay the reader’s attention to the words outstanding abilities in Marland’s definition. What do these words mean? Obviously, we have something more significant in mind: the ability to master and use those symbol
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systems that lie at the heart of the operation of our modern society. This definition is advantageous because it defines giftedness broadly rather than in terms of IQ alone, and justifies the provision of services to different kinds of the gifted and talented students. Unfortunately, it lacks conceptual clarity, and the diverse abilities referred to have been difficult to define operationally and assess reliable.
To overcome these shortcomings, Roberta Milgram (1993) has developed the “4*4” Model of the structure of giftedness. According to her model, giftedness is conceptualized in terms of four categories, two having to do with aspects of intelligence (general intellectual ability and specific intellectual ability) and two with aspects of original thinking (general original/creative thinking and specific creative talent). Each category of giftedness may be viewed as a cognitive process with a corresponding product or performance. Each of the four process is manifested in the individual at one of four ability levels:
S profoundly gifted,
S moderately gifted,
S mildly gifted,
S non-gifted, hence the name 4*4.
There are two other aspects of the model:
• there is the dimension of the learning environment.
Gifted and talented children and youth grow up in three interrelated learning environments:
1. home, 2. school, 3. community.
• giftedness is depicted as embedded in a solid circle of individual differences
associated with age, gender, socioeconomic status, culture, subculture, and personality characteristics, e.g.; 1. task commitment, 2. learning style, 3. autonomy.
The first category of the gifted and talented, general intellectual ability or overall general intelligence, refers to the ability to think abstractly and to solve problems logically and systematically. The second category, specific intellectual ability, refers to a clear and distinct intellectual ability in a given area, such as languages, science, social science, literature, or drama, music, art. In the area of languages it is reflected in aesthetic appreciation and/or ability to study the languages; in science by mastery of scientific information and principles, and it is reflected in learning the foreign languages and music by auditory discrimination (a good ear). The third
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category, general original/creative thinking, may be defined as a kind of problem-solving by means of which original, i.e., unusual, solutions of high quality are generated (Guilford, 1967; Mednick, 1962).
The ideas that result from the process of creative problem-solving in adults and children in the process of learning the languages are imaginative, clever, elegant, surprising. Among the abilities mentioned most frequently are ideational fluency, curiosity, fantasy, imagery, problemfinding, metaphoric production, selective attention deployment. Original thinking people are different from others not only at the output stage as reflected in ideational production but also at the input. They perceive and define problems differently and notice things that others ignore (Wallach, 1997). They probably store and retrieve information differently as well. As a consequence of these basis differences, they produce unique and imaginative solutions.
The fourth category, specific creative talent, refers to a clear and distinct creative ability in one area. Talent is manifested in both children and adults in the generation of socially valuable, novel products in art, music, languages, science, social leadership, business, politics, or any other important human endeavors. The realization of potential talent often requires time to incubate and develop as a result of life experience. One way to identify specific creative talent in students before these abilities become fully realized in anybody’s vocation, is by examining leisure time and out-of-school activities, because the gifted often use their leisure time in a way that is very different from the way it used by their ordinary peers. Students with special talent in languages, music, science, art spend long hours practicing and reflecting techniques on their own initiative. The enormous investment of time and effort over an extended period of time that frequently characterizes the development of talent makes it clear that the actualization of talent is not only a gift but an achievement (Bloom, 1985).
To identify a student who is gifted linguistically, we should recognize that we look for someone in possession of language aptitude rather than someone who has acquired knowledge and skills, although some of this knowledge will be considered as a part of the screening operation. We have many definitions of music talent which include the ability to retain; recognize and reproduce a short musical phrase; to have absolute pitch; to recognize intervals; to have a feeling for tonality; to have general intelligence. But there is no clear definition of the ability to study languages. The authors of this paper would like to pay attention to the existence of the theoretical orientation that regards the ability to study languages as
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something made up of a hierarchy of talents, many of which are independent of one another; or that regards a talent for study languages as comprising a number of elements subsumed under a general factor of personality (Mursell, 1932).
Lehman (1968) differentiates between tests that are designed to measure capacity for learning the languages, taking into account different learning styles and tests that are designed to measure how much has been learned or accomplished at a particular time. Since the intellectual abilities of gifted children are often so remarkable, the cognitive aspects of giftedness in common receive most attention. The circle of the individual differences among gifted students plays the important role in the "4*4” Model (Milgram, 1993). We find variables of age, gender, culture, subculture, and especially personality characteristics in this circle of the individual differences. There is necessary connection between a specific approach to curriculum and individualization instruction for the gifted students which should give major attention to learning style differences of gifted and talented students. In addition to the positive effects of matching learning style preferences and instructional environment, negative effects have been noted, particularly with gifted learners, when learning style of them is ignored. Some gifted learners remain unidentified because teachers misinterpreted and misunderstood their individual learning style that was in sharp contrast to conventional perceptions of requisite school behavior (Dunn, 1989, Dunn& Price, 1977). Many creative learners became adolescent dropouts when they were required to learn in programs antithetical to their learning styles (Gadwa & Griggs, 1985; Griggs, 1986).
Numerous definitions of learning style that differ somewhat from one another have been suggested in the scientific pedagogical and psychological literature. Dunn, DeBello, Brennan & Murrain (1981) define learning styles as the conditions under which each person begins to concentrate on, absorb, process and retain new or difficult information and skills. Sternberg (1999) believes that learning style is the preference in the use of abilities. According to Keefe (1999), learning style is the cognitive, affective and psychological trait that is relatively stable indicator of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning environment, but Spolsky (1990) points out that learning style is the identifiable individual approach to learning situations. David Kolb (1985) believes that learning styles are the generalized differences in learning orientations based on the degree to which people emphasize the four modes of the learning process as measured by a self-report test called the Learning Style Inventory -
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concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation.
But Milgram (1993) on the base of the Model of Learning Styles of Dunn (1989) defines learning styles in terms of individual student’s reactions to 23 elements of instructional environments:
• immediate environment (noise, temperature, light, design);
• emotional (motivation, persistence, responsibility, the attitude to structure of the task);
• sociological preference (learning alone, with peers, with adults present);
• physical characteristics (auditory, visual, tactile/ kinesthetic perceptual strengths, time of day, intake, mobility);
• psychological inclinations (global/analytic, hemispheric preference, impulsive/reflective).
The author firmly supports Paivio (1975, 1986) in his opinion that if new and difficult information introduced through a student’s primary perceptual strength , then is reinforced through the secondary his/her perceptual strength, learning achievements of this student will increase significantly.
Gagne (1996) claims that learning styles are the ways that individuals use to focus their knowledge and skills on problem situations that may not previously have been encountered. The results of the investigation of Learning Style are presented in the form of an individual Learning Style Profile (Dunn, 1989). Let’s analyze some of 23 elements of this Profile. Sound affects each individual differently. Some youngsters, including almost eight out of ten of the high IQ gifted, need absolute quiet when working on new or difficult tasks other learners work better with music or sounds of one type or another and many people can block out noise when they wish to do so. Increased achievement resulted when learners who reported a strong preference to study in a quiet environment were taught in a quiet room and those who reported a preference for noise in the environment were taught with noise. Decreased achievement resulted when learning style preference and learning environment were mismatched on the element of sound (Pizzo, 1981).
Furthermore, a study by DeGregors (1986) demonstrated that the type of English task is important. Educators are cautioned to provide a task without clear instructions, the gifted students tend to finish all the tasks they started. Teachers also should maintain concentration for those who work better with sound than in silence. For those who concentrate best with
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sound, should permit earphones, headsets during the English lessons, to offer tasks connected with sound, music, learning through real life creative situations. One can establish such rules:
1. Students must pay attention whenever the teacher addresses the class or them;
2. Their main talent must not interfere with anyone else’s learning;
3. They must achieve better on each subsequent test than they ever did before or, obviously, the experiment is not working and there is no need to continue.
Some students, many among the gifted, need brightly illuminated environments whereas others learn more efficiently in dim light (Dunn, 1989). Few people can learn in either extreme of warmth or cold, but the cold affects more students negatively than heat does (Murrain, 1983). The level of motivation interacts with learning style and seems to mediate its effects. Gifted students tend to be highly motivated to learn, but many of them report that they are bored in school. In several studies that examined the sociological preferences of gifted youngsters, data reveals that the gifted preferred learning alone significantly more often than the non-gifted. The senses through which each individual absorbs and retains new information about new English patterns and also in listening to music, for example, such common to most measured elements as tone, rhythm, pitch, time, and intensity, and other elements measured by one or another test relate to quality, consonance, melodic taste, timbre, and harmony, have become known as perceptual strengths, which are of the great importance in the area of learning the languages and music.
An auditory learner can remember about 75% of information from hearing. Apparently a relationship exists between the early development of perceptual skills and high IQ. Phonics is more successful with auditory students at the English lessons than with visual. Ricca (1983) found that gifted learners much prefer games, the creation of different projects, independent study and nonverbal pursuits at the English lessons. The gifted and highly gifted demonstrated highly significant preferences for right hemispheres and integrated processing...They are holistic thinkers. According to Griggs (1985:40), there are the following tasks which teachers can use at their English lessons for gifted students - Space-oriented tasks, such as Three-dimensional images, Patterns, Connections; Synthesizing tasks; Nonverbal tasks; Tasks, connected with images, pictures, metaphors; Tasks, connected with dreams; Tasks, connected with intuition, insight.
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The authors share the point of view of McCarthy (1985), who believes that gifted learners always seek a reason for learning and knowing something, they look for the personal meaning through an experience. You can help these students by encouraging them to explore the sounds of words of this mysterious English language, of beautiful English songs, ancient English ballades, and rhythms of the remarkable English poetry, the figurative language, limericks at your creative English lessons. The authors could suggest the following methods to reach and teach talented and gifted students effectively: design English lessons that incorporate the following tools:
• rhythmic patterns - illustrate an academic concept by producing rhythms, beats, and vibration patterns to show its various aspects of the English language;
• vocal sounds/Tones - illustrate something being studied with sounds produced by the vocal chords;
• music composition and creation - compose or create music to communicate in English, understanding of a concept, idea, or process;
• rapping - use raps to help communicate or remember certain concepts, ideas, or processes during the English lessons;
• environmental sounds - use the natural sounds that are part of something being studied and learned at the English lessons (for example, weather conditions, geographical situations, nature);
• instrumental sounds - use musical instruments to produce sounds for a lesson (for example, background accompaniment, enhancements for teaching English);
• singing / humming - create English songs and/or vocal chord sounds about various pieces of academic content;
• tonal patterns - recognize the tone dimension of topics being studied (for example, the sounds a computer makes, weather conditions, sounds of animals);
• musical performance - present a report in English about any aspect of life in which music and rhythm play a central role;
• musical / rhythmic “schemas“ - find existing songs , instrumental or musical themes , or various kinds of rhythmic beats that go with what is being studied at your English lesson;
• use musical-rhythmic games :
1. music recognition games, such as “ Name That Tune” from any English song, especially, for junior learners),
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2. music creation games that begin with "Create an English song”, for example, The Sea, The Autumn, Summer, Dreams, My Love, Future... ”,
3. rhythmic patterns and sound recognition games ”Guess what made this sound”, that could be used in learning any English words.
4. rhythmic pattern and sound creation games such as “Going on a Lion Hunt”, “Strangers in the Night”, “Nocturne", where the students have the possibility to create a performance, a play on the given theme.
♦ create Musical-Rhythmic Discussion Questions:
1. What sounds and noises do you remember? (of any English patterns)
2. Where were you aware of music being used? Can you hum any of the themes?
3. What words would you add to the musical production if you could?
Conclusion
The authors can conclude that teaching and learning English as well as music in contemporary Latvian secondary schools is a very complicated process, especially, for the gifted and talented. When interviewed after having achieved eminence in their fields, very few gifted adults mention their schools and teachers as important influences in the development of their giftedness. That means our schools meet the needs of only a small number of the gifted learners. The authors believe this failure can be attributed largely to undifferentiated education. One way to improve the situation is to customize the school experience for each gifted student. To customize means to tailor to the unique needs of each learner. The authors believe that the process of customizing the education of the gifted students is guided by following three main principles: to individualize the curriculum, the instructional process, and to develop a creative classroom environment, according to your students’ learning styles.
Because the gifted and talented students tend to be highly motivated, independent, persistent, internally controlled, capable of providing their own structure, perceptually strong, and enjoy learning by themselves or with other gifted peers, individualized instructions and learning tasks correspond well to learning styles of many gifted students. If new and difficult information introduced through a student’s primary perceptual strength, then reinforced through the secondary his/her perceptual strength, his/her learning achievements will increase significantly. This instructional approach increases students’ motivation, responds to the characteristics of gifted students, provides degrees of freedom, sociological and environmental choices. Gifted children using this approach can achieve at
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their own pace in a mainstreamed classroom where some students advance more or less rapidly than others.
All gifted students should be given the opportunity to choose the tasks in the English language and learning strategies to do these tasks in order to demonstrate individual domain-specific special interests and abilities. These would be manifested in individual or small-group projects that result in products to be evaluated by the English teacher and in some instances to be shared with peers. These products would reflect a continuing trend in the direction of the development of abilities and interests. Teachers should consider intrinsically motivated domain-specific behaviour of the gifted, both in and out of school, as additional indices of potential eminence. These students spend many hours reading, practicing an instrument, painting, working in their " laboratories " reflect not only their intellectual abilities but task commitment, other cognitive and personal -social attributes that determine strongly learning outcomes.
One could argue that projects in school and leisure activities outside of school are more stable and valid indicators of giftedness than IQ scores (Milgram, 1993). The gifted are more persistent in accomplishment the tasks, they prefer the creative tasks that are not structured, that allow them to perform their ability to create, to imagine, to use their potential more widely.
By responding to learning style differences of their students, teachers will have made a breakthrough towards maximizing the potential and innate talents and giftedness of individuals. The gifted and talented students, use learning English as the means, encourage themselves to self-esteem, responsibility, persistence, to the whole further successful development of their unique personality and self-actualization.
Reference
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