Gifted university students: last chance to ‘come out of the closet'

Rozz Albon, Curtin University of Technology
Tony Jewels, United Arab Emirate University

Abstract

If, as some people believe, university teaching is all about allowing or enabling students to attain their full potential, rather than merely creating more ‘bricks in the wall’, gifted students provide a particularly thorny problem for teaching academics in the contemporary university environment. Many gifted students, by the time they reach university, have long since established, in their attempts to ‘fit in’, how to hide their special talents. A university environment may well be the final formal opportunity for gifted students to be accepted as such, and most importantly, for them to take better advantage of these capabilities in their ongoing education.

Evolving from the findings of a case study approach, the authors propose a model that might be used to help gifted university students reach their full potential. The “I” model for teaching gifted students consists of four functions – having incentive to recognize gifted students, identifying gifted students, suitably involving gifted students in mandated curriculum and the internalization of giftedness by the students themselves. Gifted students may have had little opportunity in their pre-university education to take advantage of their giftedness. It is suggested that for tertiary sector educators to extend this languishing of gifted students in an apparently ubiquitous quest for educational ‘massification’, is contrary to the customary, time-honored nature of any university education.