I would like to know what this means. Anybody want to explain?
Here's a quote from a summary of Dr. Rogers' work (which was a summary itself; I'm going to try to get the original paper tomorrow).
Summary of her work in PDF form Gifted students are decontextualists in their processing, rather than constructivists; therefore it is difficult to reconstruct "how" they came to an answer.
Gifted learners as decontextualists tend to learn most successfully when they are given the whole concept, in depth, up front and then allowed to break it down through analysis.
These statements are pretty big generalizations.
One of the ideas that comes up repeatedly on this board is that gifted kids have many different learning styles. So the apparent claim that all gifted kids learn by taking in a whole gulp and then extracting details seems flawed to me. And I expect that individual gifted kids can take some things in as a gulp but have to go stepwise through other things. I presume that it all depends on the kid and the subject.
And the statements are also contradictory: the top one says that it's difficult for gifted kids to reconstruct how they get an answer. The bottom one implies that they can break a whole concept into details through analysis. It seems reasonable that
sometimes they should be able toapply the same process to how they got an answer, especially if given a bit of time. I also expect that some non-gifted kids just figure stuff out sometimes without knowing why.
Overall, I'd say that IT DEPENDS.
(I'm not wild about unsupported generalizations.)
One thing I really don't like about the paper (or whatever it is) is the complete lack of references. How were the studies designed? How many kids were involved? Were they at different schools, and if so, where and how many? What were the controls? How did she analyze the data?
Research that's unsupported by even a single other published paper is always suspect. I'll try to get the original tomorrow; maybe it's better.
Val
