Chances and Limitations of Implementing Measures of Differentiation for Gifted Children in Primary Schools: The Teachers’ Part

The presented study analyzes German primary school teachers’ attitudes towards several measures of internal differentiation with re-spect to the anticipated benefit for gifted pupils and the anticipated work load for teachers. Be-sides, correlations of these attitudes with teach-ers’ statements on the frequency of adopting the measures in their own classes were inspected. One-hundred thirty-seven teachers and teacher students were interviewed with a questionnaire on the assessed consequences and the fre-quency of the usage of several methods of dif-ferentiation. Data analysis was done by anal-yses of variance and calculation of Pearson cor-relation coefficients. Results show that teachers, as well as teacher students, mostly assessed the listed measures of internal differentiation to be appropriate for the promotion of gifted pupils, but for teachers there were significant negative correlations between assessed work load and frequency of usage in their own classes.