A case study of the identification, policies, and practices for gifted students in a Lebanese private school -

Abstract

This study investigates whether schools in Lebanon are addressing the needs of gifted children and if so, how. The study has a three-fold purpose: (1) to identify the most important factors, abilities and characteristics considered in the identification of gifted students; (2) to determine the measures and classroom practices applied by the teachers in order to meet the needs of gifted students; and (3) to point out the policies that schools implement to meet the needs of gifted students. The study used a mixed-method design by relying on both quantitative and qualitative data and focusing on one particular high school as a case study. The school selected was a private high school having classes from the K-12 grades in the region of Beirut. The school had neither a special program for giftedness nor any advanced classes. Data was gathered directly in the form of questionnaires, interviews, and documentary evidence collected from the school records and official documents and publications. The findings of the study revealed that the school does not have any official identification procedure besides the diagnostic test administered at the beginning of every year to determine the students’ different levels. Regarding the three-fold purpose, results showed that: (1) parents and teachers mainly agreed on most of the characteristics of gifted students such as “goal directed”, “long attention span”, “can generate original ideas and solutions”, and “Responsible; can be counted on” ; and only disagreed on issues relating to the affective-social-emotional characteristics; (2) for almost all of the classroom practices, the options that the parents chose matched the teachers’ responses such as “Substitute different assignments for students who have mastered regular classroom work”, “Use enrichment worksheets”, and “Assign reading of more advanced level work”; and (3) the comparison between the answers of the parents and those o