Examining of the Gifted Students’ Teacher Preferences

Gifted students differ from their peers in terms of motivations, learning, social and emotional needs. Because of these differences, it is indispensible that their teachers have to have a number of different characteristics. Because, teachers’ personality tratis and professional qualifications affects gifted students’ academic, cognitive and affective development. The main aim of this study is to examine that whether gifted students’ preferences of characteristics that teachers should have, differs according to type of educational institution, student's gender and level of meeting their educational needs or not. The study was designed as descriptive, one of the survey models. The study group consists of 1077 gifted students who are enrolled at five Science High School state schools, a private gifted school and three Science and Art Centers in Thracia Region in Turkey. As a means of data collection, Gifted Students’ Teacher Preferences Scale (GSTPS) developed by Sahin & Tortop (2013) was used. In the calculation of internal consistency reliability of research data, Cronbach's α value was calculated. Cronbach alfa realibity cofficients were found to be .92 for Personality Traits sub-scale, .89 Professional Qualification sub-scale and .94 GSTPS, respectively. Besides, it was seen that based on the gender of participants, there was no difference in the characteristics they want to see in teachers and the opinions of students in High Schools and at SACs differed from the ones who were in the private school. Moreover, it was determined that the scores of the ones who thought the schools met their educational needs fully and the ones who thought the schools met their educational needs partially varied significantly.