Teachers’ attitudes toward gifted children in pre-schools in Palestine

Abstract

Gifted pre-school children are often identified as those who read words, interpret signs, and demonstrate interests of children older than them, and are considered an exceptional group of children compared to other normal children. Therefore, early identification of gifted children helps to provide educational opportunities and a rich environment for the development of their talents. The main purpose of the current study is to examine the teachers’ attitudes in pre-school toward the education of gifted children in Palestine and identify the educational strategies and programs for teaching gifted children. The mixed-methods approach was adopted; it is an approach that mixes qualitative and quantitative methods to gain a deep understanding and confirm outcomes. In this study, the researchers adopted an explanatory sequential design, which is a sequential approach, and it began with quantitative data collection and analysis, followed by qualitative data collection and analysis. The quantitative data were collected by the “Scale for Attitudes towards Gifted Education.” The pre-school teachers in the sample were randomly selected, consisting of 330 female pre-school teachers from public schools. Additionally, the qualitative data were collected by semi-structured interview, which 15 female pre-school teachers from public schools took part in. The quantitative findings indicated that teachers had positive attitudes regarding the education of gifted children. This was consistent with the findings of qualitative data, which also demonstrated the variety of educational strategies and programs that were used to teach gifted children in Palestine.