There has been a longstanding assumption that gifted, high-ability, or high-performing students prefer working alone; however, this may not be true in every case. The current study expanded on this assumption to reveal more nuanced learning preferences of these students. Sixty-nine high-performing and community-school students in Grades 5 and 6…

Pedagogical shifts favouring collaborative learning and findings of recent studies have raised concerns regarding the claim that gifted students prefer to learn alone. The purpose of this study was to further investigate if, when and how high ability learners want to work with or without others. The distributions of 416 high ability students (n =…