Thinking and Learning

Students' beliefs or perceptions about intelligence and ability affect their cognitive functions and learning

Gifted students are more likely, but not always, to attribute failure to lack of effort rather than question their ability. When students believe their performance can be improved, they are acquiring a growth mindset that can bring to bear motivation and persistence when they encounter challenging problems or material.

Tips for teachers

• Avoid generating ability-based credit when a task is easy (e.g., saying “You’re so smart” after the student quickly figures out an answer to a relatively unchallenging problem. In such a case, the teacher may inadvertently encourage that student to associate smartness with speed and lack of effort).
• Self-handicapping may reflect a student’s fear of embarrassment or failure (“If I don’t even try, people will not think I’m dumb if I fail”). This may lead to gifted children who take risks in situations in which they are sure they can excel. It’s important to reward reflective thinking as much as speed of recall.
• Help students find good ways to “scaffold” so they can learn a new skill or compensate for a weakness that can help them overcome insecurity related to intellectual risk taking.
• Focus on improving behavior by modeling and offering constructive criticism to better highlight what students are doing well and where they can improve.

What students already know affects their learning

Gifted learners tend to learn more efficiently than others. This unique academic need deserves to be addressed equitably in school. Researchers have learned that optimal learning occurs when there is a match between the challenge level of the learning task and skill level of the learner.

Tips for teachers

Teachers are instrumental in assessing what gifted students already know and providing them with opportunities to learn new material, challenge misconceptions and acquire new skills:

• To determine the academic readiness of students, teachers should administer pre-assessments before instruction on a topic.
• Design new learning experiences that are challenging and appropriate for increasing students’ conceptual growth.
• Bringing about conceptual change requires teachers’ use of specific instructional strategies that bring on cognitive conflict in the minds of students by helping make them aware of the difference between their thinking and the desired outcomes of the lesson.

Student's cognitive development and learning are not limited by general stages of development

For students with advanced academic abilities and/or achievement, optimal cognitive and talent development depends on providing them with access to appropriately challenging content that can stimulate them intellectually. It is also important to note that cognitive abilities can be asynchronous (i.e., giftedness can be exhibited within a single domain and not carry over to the same extent to other domains or to noncognitive development).

Tips for teachers

Teachers should evaluate their students’ domain-specific cognitive reasoning abilities, relevant content knowledge, and social and emotional needs and adjust what material to present to them accordingly. Teachers are encouraged to consider strategies to maximize the growth of gifted students’ reasoning abilities, such as:

• Measuring reasoning abilities and content knowledge before determining appropriate instructional levels.
• Recognizing there should not be an expectation of exceptional performance in all subjects to qualify for higher level instruction in areas of strength.
• Recognizing that students with advanced reasoning abilities in a subject may lack advanced knowledge due to lack of prior exposure, but they may be able to master material faster than other students and should be given the opportunity to move at their own pace.
• Encouraging students’ critical thinking and reasoning abilities by providing challenging opportunities for solving complex problems, particularly in areas in which students already have substantial knowledge.
• Providing students with project-based, cooperative and situated learning opportunities to encourage innovation, creative thinking, practical skills and social development.
• Encouraging discussion, discourse and debate that provoke thinking to encourage cognitive development through social interaction.
• Ensuring that gifted students have opportunities to interact with other students who are at or above their cognitive reasoning and knowledge levels.
• Making students aware of, and facilitate access to, opportunities to extend their learning and to meet intellectual peers outside of the classroom.
• Providing opportunities to students who have the potential to excel beyond their age group but who lack background knowledge to fill gaps in their knowledge base.
• Understanding that students with exceptionally advanced cognitive abilities may not be similarly advanced socially and emotionally.

Learning is based on context. Generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous; it needs to be facilitated

By using more sophisticated strategies for learning, thinking and problem solving than others their age, gifted students are more likely to spontaneously apply their knowledge in contexts quite different from those in which it was learned. This ability to use previously learned knowledge and skills in unfamiliar tasks contributes to the rapid pace of gifted students’ learning. Like their same-age peers, they can learn more and better ways to transfer and generalize, but peers will need more and different instruction, support and practice.

Tips for teachers

Developing gifted students’ transfer and generalization is best done by having them engage in activities that do the following:

• Including and building on prior knowledge and strengths.
• Providing opportunities for students to learn content in multiple contexts.
• Encourage and expect students to notice and find applications of their knowledge beyond the classroom.
• Scaffolding transfer and generalization initially by guiding it, gradually reducing the teacher’s role, encouraging students to take responsibility for these actions over time until they use them automatically.
• Solving challenging, complex, real-world problems.

Acquiring long-term knowledge and skill is largely dependent on practice.

Intelligence and talent provide the grounding for more efficient and effective use of instruction and practice. Many gifted students are capable of efficient knowledge acquisition and developing innovative mechanisms for encoding new information, retrieving knowledge, and applying skills. However, higher stages of skill and knowledge acquisition will inevitably require practice, concentration and targeted experiences.

Tips for teachers

Gifted students, like all students, must practice acquiring knowledge and skills they have not mastered and practice should be designed to appeal to their goals and aspirations, which can be gaining access to more enjoyable and creative work once mastery is achieved.

Clear, explanatory and timely feedback to students is important for learning.

It is preferable that when gifted students are working on problem solving and open-ended tasks, they be given opportunities to work through the problem-solving process and evaluate their progress independently rather than rely solely on a teacher’s external evaluation of their work. Teachers can facilitate this process by providing feedback at key stages that is clear and timely, providing scaffolding for complex tasks.

Tips for teachers

• Feedback from teachers can be used to help gifted learners calibrate self-assessment of their work.
• Teachers should provide feedback at points during the learning process when students need additional support — while allowing learners to discover and learn independently when appropriate.
• Encourage students to persevere through complex tasks, independently of external evaluation to develop greater skills and self-reliance.
• With proper instructional support and guidance, gifted students can provide quality feedback to peers, and this strategy can be used to help increase motivation, achievement and metacognitive skills.
• Students tend to respond better if feedback minimizes negativity and addresses significant aspects relevant to the learning goals.
• For gifted learners engaged in long-term projects and goals, regular feedback at key benchmarks can be used to help students maintain motivation with evidence of incremental progress.

Students' self-regulation assists learning; self-regulatory skills can be taught.

Two types of learning strategies are crucial for self-regulated learning (SRL): cognitive learning strategies (e.g., rehearsal, organization, and elaboration strategies) and metacognitive learning strategies (e.g., self-assessment, goal setting and monitoring). Especially during their first years of schooling, gifted learners often achieve at high levels without relying on such learning strategies. However, when they transition into more challenging learning settings, or when they begin to work on attaining excellence in a given talent domain, SRL becomes essential for gifted learners, too.

Tips for teachers

• Start by introducing the individual facets of SRL during instruction and systematically practice using the individual SRL strategy components.
• Consider the curricular and extracurricular areas in which the individual aspects of SRL can be helpful with your students.
• SRL practice needs to be based on concrete, authentic content from the regular curriculum. Practicing learning strategies with students should not become isolated from actual classroom instruction.
• Guide your students — in a systematic, well-structured manner — to observe the connections between their own learning behavior and their own accomplishments.
• Provide all your students with learning situations for SRL that are tailored to their respective achievement levels and, thereby, create authentic opportunities for each student to experience the benefits of SRL.
• Apply SRL strategies in as many subjects as possible.

Student creativity can be fostered

The relationship between creativity and giftedness varies — with some seeing creativity as a separate but related construct from giftedness; others seeing it as a component of giftedness; and still others seeing it as a subcategory of some other trait, such as intelligence, that contributes to giftedness. However, no matter the view, creativity can be fostered and enhanced in all leaners. 

Tips for teachers

• Educators should familiarize themselves with processes used to assess creativity and how to foster it through assignments.
• When gifted programs have an established goal of growth in creative thinking, teachers should advocate for the inclusion of students with high creativity in those programs, even if those students may not meet other identification criteria. 

• Teachers should downplay the use of rewards and praise for students’ creative efforts, focusing instead on the value of the experience and the application of real-world criteria for creative products.
• Teachers should model the characteristics of creative individuals and in their teaching (e.g., taking well-considered risks, being open to new experience, persisting in the face of failure, developing tolerance for ambiguity).

The creative process is often misconstrued as being purely spontaneous or even frivolous, yet creativity and innovation are the result of disciplined thinking. For this reason, teachers can employ instructional strategies that can foster creativity by:

• Including prompts in assignments such as create, invent, discover, imagine or predict and explicitly instructing students in what these prompts entail cognitively and productively.
• Exploring professional literature for specific strategies or creative thinking skills models that can be used for teaching creative approaches to problem solving.
• Evaluating with students any strategies discovered for use within an academic or artistic domain.
• Explicitly teaching methods for discovering problems that require creative solutions — including awareness of world, national and local issues; openness to experience; a questioning attitude toward the status quo; and sensitivity to the bigger issues that might be represented by personal concerns.