Counseling Gifted and Talented Students: Scoping Review (2000-2022)

Abstract

Education has a unique program called gifted and talented counseling that focuses on the special requirements of kids with high aptitude levels in one or more areas. These students often face various challenges and stressors that differ from those experienced by their peers, such as intellectual and educational concerns, high expectations and perfectionism, psychological concerns, and underachievement. For this reason, they require a specific approach to counseling that considers their exceptional abilities and needs. Gifted and talented students are different and unique, which makes their needs unique. They need special attention because they have high cognitive ability and socio-emotional conditions. As such, school counselors have a unique role in meeting the needs of gifted students within their schools. Unfortunately, structured and empirically tested effective strategies for counseling these students are lacking.

This scoping review explores the effectiveness of counseling services, interventions, and programs with gifted and talented students by focusing on the concerns associated with them, counseling strategies to address their unique needs, and how counseling improves the quality of their lives. The study used the Arksey and O'Malley framework for the scoping review. This framework allowed the team to specify the research question, identify relevant literature, select studies, map out the data, and summarize, synthesize, and report the results. It also used the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews) criteria to identify the relevant articles and publications. The inclusion criteria for studies in this review include published in a peer-reviewed journal between 2000 and 2022, reported original research data, and school counseling services. Non-per-reviewed articles and secondary sources not written in English, a thesis or a dissertation, book chapters, and conference abstracts were excluded from this review.

The review found that counseling aims to understand the psychological lives of these students by applying mental health and human development principles. Gifted and talented students face various challenges that can be categorized as academic and non-academic. Academic challenges include underperformance, higher expectations, and perfectionism, while non-academic challenges include social, cognitive, and emotional concerns, including uneven development and inability to process their emotions. Counselors can use different counseling models and techniques based on the student's challenge and the context of the challenge. This population's most common counseling techniques include differentiated therapy, CBT, SFBT, group therapy, and family therapy. Through counseling and therapy sessions, counselors offer empathy, create rapport, improve the student's coping skills, provide psychosocial support, and improve their resilience.