Sinalização de alunos com altas habilidades

: relação das perceções dos professores com o rendimento escolar dos alunos

Abstract

The theme of gifted children has become increasingly common in the Portuguese community and among professionals in education, however, this effort is still not considered sufficient to raise awareness of the various partakers that try to identify gifted students or those with more talent. The reduced investment, by part of the researchers, in the construction and validation of tools that make this identification more accurate and valid, as well as the non-integration of teacher training and other professionals in education, constitute obstacles in identifying these students. With this study we intend to, modestly, contribute to the discussion of the teacher‟s role in signaling gifted students, seeking possible differences in the identification of gifted students based on the perceptions of teachers, by gender and parents‟ educational level. For this purpose, we gathered the teachers‟ indicators through the two scales of Bateria de Instrumentos para a Sinalização de Alunos Sobredotados e Talentosos (BISAST) Habilidade Cognitiva e Aprendizagem (HC/A) e Habilidade Social (HS) de Almeida, Oliveira & Melo (2000) along with the school achievement obtained by the students. The sample consisted of six faculty members who taught the first cycle of Basic Education (Ensino Básico – 1º Ciclo) in the Groups of Schools of Arcos de Valdevez. These teachers have issued opinions about 130 students in the fourth grade, distributed in 6 classes. The students were between the ages of 9 and 10, 66 were female and 64 male. The results are similar to those obtained in several investigations; the recognition of gifted students by teachers is preferentially associated with cognitive abilities and aspects of school learning (Almeida, & Nogueira, 1998; Miranda, 2003; Pereira, 1998; Santos, 2001). Teachers seem to build up better signaling models in terms of cognitive abilities and less to those related to creativity which goes against the study of Miranda (2008). In reference to parents „educational level, the results allow us to deduce that students whose parents have a higher clearance of literary achieve a higher academic performance, with an exception that is verified in the visual arts curriculum. Our study also suggests that teachers signaled /indicated more girls than boys, which, for example does not meet the studies Falcão (1992) and Terman (1925).

Date of Award	7 Nov 2011
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Lúcia Miranda (Supervisor)