Meeting the Needs of Gifted and Talented Students in Agricultural Education: An Exploratory Study

Agriculture teachers are responsible for the education of a mixed ability classroom, in which there may be students identified as gifted. It is unclear how much preservice preparation agriculture teachers receive in order to challenge this population of students or what inservice teacher professional development needs exist. This study aimed to measure agriculture teacher attitudes toward working with gifted students as well as their preservice teacher preparation and current professional development needs. Just over half of participants that completed a traditional teacher preparation program felt adequately prepared to meet the needs of gifted students in their classrooms. Agriculture teachers mostly agreed that students should be challenged, gifted students are a valuable part of their classroom, and that differentiating for gifted students is important. Responding teachers mostly disagreed that their content knowledge is challenged, gifted students are bored in their classrooms, and that they feel threatened by the intelligence of gifted students in their class. Professional development is needed in creating challenging classroom content, differentiating instruction and teaching problem-solving skills to gifted agriculture students.