Browsing by Subject "lahjakkuuskäsitykset"

There are multiple ways of defining giftedness. Many researchers have offered their own theories and models to answer the question ”what giftedness is?” Beside the large number of explicit theories made by experts we all have our own implicit theories of giftedness. The aim of this study was to examinate Finnish teacher students’ conceptions of giftedness and to compare their conceptions to Finnish elementary school teachers’ conceptions which was studied recently by Laine, Kuusisto and Tirri (2016). The importance of researching the future class teachers’ conceptions of giftedness lies in the important role of teacher in relation to their students. In school settings teachers are the ones who are supposed to identify giftedness and to decide which kind of support they offer to their students. Teachers’ own conceptions of giftedness can affect whether student is considered gifted or not. There has been a lot of previous studies about students’ conceptions of giftedness, but in Finland the research about teachers’ and especially teacher students’ conceptions of giftedness is limited. A qualitative approach was used with deductive content analyses to answer the research questions. CoPErNicus-project gave me a previously collected data which contained teacher students’ open-ended definitions of giftedness. The data was collected in 2016 in University of Helsinki from first year teacher students (n=80). The background theory in my analyses was a classification made by Laine et al. (2016) in their research of teachers’ conceptions of giftedness. Based on their classification I analyzed, coded and quantified the data. The study found that teacher students defined giftedness via two main categories: giftedness as a phenomenon and characteristics of the gifted person. Giftedness as a phenomenon was mostly described as multidimensional, meaning that giftedness can occur in many different areas. Giftedness was also described as difference from others. The developmental nature of giftedness was often described as fixed quality, but most of the students described both fixed and malleable aspects of giftedness at the same time. Cognitive features were the most referenced category of characteristics of the gifted person main category. Students’ conceptions of giftedness were similar in many ways comparing to teachers’ conceptions. The biggest surprise in the results was how only few students defined giftedness through creative features. More knowledge about teachers’ and teacher students’ conceptions of giftedness is needed. In-depth and mixed-methods research designs could help deepen the understanding about conceptions of giftedness and how students see the developmental nature of giftedness.