Abstracts Category : Other

Turkish Pre-Service Elementary School Teachers' Perceptions of Giftedness and Factors Affecting Their Referral Decisions

by Omer Erdimez

The purpose of this study was to detect Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers' perceptions of giftedness and factors affecting their referral decisions through eleven profiles (scenarios) originally created by five experts in the field of gifted education and semi-structured interview questions created for this study. The original profiles were translated from English to Turkish and adapted to be more relevant to Turkish culture. These profiles were named as Student Profiles Survey in this study. The profiles were varied based on characteristics embedded in each profile and I was able to create eight versions (pile) of the Student Profiles Survey. Profiles in each version (pile) of Student Profiles Survey differed from each other based on the characteristics embedded in each profile. Participants of the study were Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers who were attending two colleges of Education at Gaziantep University, namely Gaziantep College of Education and Nizip College of Education. A total of 204 Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers participated in the study and filled out the different versions of Student Profiles Survey. Approximately 25 pre-service teachers filled out each version of Student Profiles Survey. In addition, 16 of the pre-service teachers were asked for a follow-up interview. The convergent parallel mixed-methods design was used to shed light on the research questions. The findings from quantitative and qualitative analyses were combined to support each other and to better investigate Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers' perceptions of giftedness and factors affecting their referral decisions. The results of this study indicated that Profile 11 was the most appropriate and Profile 4 was the least appropriate profile for Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers' perceptions of giftedness. Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers explained their reasons for including the students in the profiles to gifted education programs mostly based on the personal, academic, and social characteristics of the students embedded in the profiles but they did not often referred students' characteristics when they were explaining their reasons for exclusion. Rather than explaining their reasons based on characteristics of the students, Turkish pre-service teachers increased their expectations and created excuses to underestimate the potentials of the students in the profiles when they were asked to explain their reasons for exclusion. The results of factorial ANOVAs indicated that Turkish pre-service elementary school teachers' referral decisions were influenced by the following factors: Students and pre-service teachers gender, students' ability areas, personality traits of the students, words describing the student, and students' length of passion.Advisors/Committee Members: Lopez, Francesca A (advisor), Lopez, Francesca A. (committeemember).