Purpose
One of the characteristics of special education in Taiwan is that it takes into account the special students who need to provide services, not only protecting the learning rights and interests of students with disabilities, but also caring about the potential development of gifted students. Therefore, in the Special Education Law (2019) and the current implementation of the General Guidelines for the 12-Year National Education Curriculum (2021), both propose that gifted students have special learning needs. To meet the special needs of gifted students and develop their potential, they can be given gifted (resource) classes for placement; special needs courses and curriculum adjustments are provided in the curriculum; and more interaction, discussion, group cooperation, etc. should be adopted in teaching. However, due to the myths of giftedness in Chinese society and the long-term influence of academic-oriented education, academic performance is particularly valued for gifted students, especially at the junior high and high school stages facing national examinations and college entrance examinations. The implementation of gifted education inevitably focuses on subject training, or even regards “over-practice” as the norm of learning. However, students’ attitudes will affect their learning behavior and performance. For subjects that are closely related to academic advancement, students often cannot give appropriate views. Therefore, we hope that gifted education can help students develop their potential and make their talents become important human capital for the country, rather than just aiming at entering prestigious schools. We must pay more attention to students’ initiative and engagement in learning. Therefore, the educational services we provide to gifted students should not only directly satisfy their enrichment in learning content, but also pay attention to students’ affective attitudes and cognition and participation in learning, so as to construct better mental representations. In other words, it is to pay attention to the learning engagement of gifted students. The concept of learning engagement most widely used by the public includes three aspects: behavioral engagement, emotional engagement and cognitive engagement. Reeve and Tseng (2011) also added agency engagement to emphasize students’ personal initiative. The researcher believes that after adding agency engagement to the concept, it can more completely explain the learning engagement of gifted students. Based on this, this study focuses on the learning engagement status of junior high and high school gifted students, hoping to understand how the gifted students who receive gifted education services are engaged in learning. Learning engagement has a clear positive impact on academic achievement and even student interest. In recent ten years, studies on learning engagement have found that the environment has an impact on learning engagement. Gifted students are an important human resource for national competitiveness, and the cost of gifted education is higher than that of general education. Whether gifted students can fully develop their abilities after receiving gifted education depends on whether their special needs are met and satisfied, and whether they have better learning engagement. Therefore, this study takes mathematically talented junior high school students as samples and tracks their learning engagement changes during the three years of receiving gifted education. It also compares the differences in learning engagement changes between junior high and high school mathematically talented students.
Methods
The participants were surveyed annually from grades seven to nine and grades ten to twelve using a learning engagement scale. This research sampled 70 junior high schools, with a total of 847 math and science gifted resource class students, as well as 26 high schools, with a total of 934 math and science gifted class students. The effective sample size is 777 math and science gifted students in junior high school and 756 math and science gifted students in high school. The data collected was analyzed using latent growth modeling to understand the linear development of learning engagement and compare differences in learning engagement changes between junior high school and high school mathematically gifted students. Additionally, conditional latent growth modeling was used to examine the impact of gender and tutoring on learning engagement.
Results
The results showed that learning engagement among junior high school mathematically gifted students decreased linearly over time, while there was no significant trend in learning engagement among senior high school mathematically gifted students. The two groups did not exhibit identical growth patterns in learning engagement. Junior high school mathematically gifted students who received tutoring had higher rates of decline in learning engagement than those who did not receive tutoring, but there was no significant difference for senior high school students. Only at grade ten did female mathematically gifted students show significantly higher levels of learning engagement than male students.
Conclusions
According to the research results mentioned above, this study proposes teaching and research suggestions that can be explored in the future: (1) In this study, regardless of whether it is junior high school or high school math and science gifted students, the trend of learning investment did not increase as expected. Although gifted classes were provided and gifted courses were introduced, the learning motivation and interest of gifted students did not correspondingly increase. Instead, it continued to be worn down during junior high school. Supportive assistance, special needs area courses and curriculum adjustments should be provided. The researcher hopes that the teaching environment of gifted classes in the future should pay more attention to the content design of special needs courses such as emotion, creativity and independent research, increase teaching arrangements that can enhance high-level thinking and group cooperation, and change the current excessive practice-oriented approach to college entrance examinations. (2) The trend of learning investment among math and science gifted students in this study is similar to that of general students in previous studies. It decreases with increasing grade. However, after providing gifted education services, is the degree of decline less than that of general students? Or are there no differences between them? In the future, data from both general students and gifted students can be obtained simultaneously to understand whether the slope and variation of learning investment decline are the same for both groups and to understand the effectiveness of gifted services based on this.
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