Rambo-Hernandez and McCoach's analysis into the longitudinal growth of high-achieving students offered two conclusions about the reading growth of high achieving students: high-achieving students lose less ground in reading during the summer, but they exhibit less growth over the school year. This study will seek to replicate the reading results…

Historically, students within the top 1% of general intellectual ability (GIA) have been described as having unusual personality characteristics. It is generally accepted that students within the top 1% of GIA have unusual academic abilities and educational needs; however, the unusual social-emotional needs of students within the top 1% of GIA are…

The purpose of this mixed-method action research study was to support the asynchronous development of third-grade gifted students at GWE by identifying their key social and emotional needs and determining the outcomes of a differentiated SEL curriculum. The four most significant affective areas of social and emotional need as self-reported by the…

The present qualitative case study examined the perceived effects of gifted teachers' perceptions on gifted students' engagement in the general education classroom. The study focused on how these perceptions affected how gifted teachers present academics to gifted students, particularly those not engaged in the lessons proposed by the teacher. The…

Administrators in school systems strive to ensure that the identification of giftedness in elementary students results in proportional demographic representation. Overly stringent or biased gifted identification results in deserving students receiving fewer opportunities-to-learn and exacerbates the excellence gap. My aim in this action research…

This quantitative descriptive comparative study compared academic achievement scores and student growth percentiles from a southwestern state's test of third-grade students, identified as gifted and talented, enrolled within a self-contained setting, receiving the William and Mary Language Arts Curriculum and the third-grade students, identified…

This Dissertation in Practice (DIP) utilizes Action Research methods to answer the question of: What is the impact of utilizing an authentic study of an author's life and literary works to increase students' motivation to read in a third grade gifted and talented classroom? Through intentional questioning and inquiry, the following Chapters…

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorders among children and adolescents. In addition, anxiety is strongly connected to academic performance, poor social functioning, and specific learning disabilities. The current study aimed to explore anxiety in new first-fourth grade students identified with learning difference(s) after 1…

Through the years, education policy has changed and shifted to include the issue of choice in politics and policy. Charter schools have increased in Texas and tax credit and voucher systems have been implemented in many parts of the United States. Due to this increased presence of choice, public schools responded with the implementation and…

Teachers have the responsibility to educate a diverse group of students in heterogeneous classes. One way in which teachers meet this challenge is to differentiate the curriculum to meet the needs, interests, and abilities of each student. One particular group of students in need of a differentiated curriculum to maximize learning potential is the…

Fidelity of implementation (FOI) is the extent to which delivery of an intervention adheres to the original intent of the program designer. FOI in educational studies is hindered by the lack of a universally agreed upon definition or set of criteria for measurement. With the increasing need for justification of reliability and validity of…

A differentiated curriculum for the gifted provides learning experiences that are challenging, interesting, satisfying, useful in the application to the real world, transferable to other disciplines and content areas, and allows for choice. While a differentiated curriculum is necessary for gifted learners, students' attitudes, opinions, and…

This study examined whether SMART Board technology increased growth in mathematics performance of fourth grade gifted students. Gifted students in North Carolina were studied to determine if the use of SMART Board technology during mathematics instruction impacted their growth on standardized state tests. The sample consisted of 175 students from…

This is a quantitative research study using archival data to focus on the achievement of Gifted & Talented students in two South Carolina public school districts. The researcher used an open cohort comparative research design for this study. This study attempted to find if differences in student performance existed between students labeled as…

This study was conducted to understand how the prompts of depth and complexity affect gifted and non-gifted student understanding across the disciplines and was performed to (1) provide validation of the prompts in relationship to student acquisition of subject matter and (2) determine how the prompts of depth and complexity were related to…