Affective Characteristics Of Gifted Students And Meeting Educational Essay

Affective Characteristics Of Gifted Students And Meeting Educational Needs - Essay Example They learn to read at an early age and learn common basic skills more quickly and in a better way than other children. The intellectual complexity of gifted children in combination with their intensity on the emotional front gives them a different outlook towards the world in qualitative terms. Gifted students have greater potential to attain high achievements which is the outcome of combination of unique and complex deep thinking, and intense as well as rich emotions. They are the people who can be considered people with well above average intelligence. This peculiar characteristic of gifted students has significant impact on their life at social, psychological and emotional level as they are different from their age peers. Due to the affective characteristics of gifted students at social and emotional front, it is required on the part of teachers to treat ‘giftedness’ as normal and ensure the social as well as emotional well being of these students (Robert & Davidson, 2005). It is required that these students should be helped to find real intellectual peers so that they can behave normal without introversion and can express themselves without any fear or doubt in their mind to the world. In order to meet educational needs of these students, teachers should adopt appropriate strategies. Overview of intellectually gifted students Intellectually gifted students behave differently from their age peers in terms of learning patterns, behaviour and characteristics related to creativity. For instance, gifted students usually read quickly and widely, have large vocabularies, intense focus and attention, and have the ability to tackle the tasks and assignments given to them in a goal-oriented manner (Reis & Moon, 2004). In regards to the learning characteristics, intellectually gifted children have keen power of observation. They also take enormous pleasure in getting indulged in intellectual activities and prefer reading books and magazines that are meant for the children who are older than them. In terms of perceiving similarities, anomalies or any kind of differences, they are quick in comparison to their age peers. Considering the creative characteristics, these students are fluent thinkers and are quite able to relate ideas as well as generate possibilities. Elaborate thinking, production of new ideas, willingness to tackle complexity and good guessing power are other creative characteristics of intellectually gifted students (Dixon et al, 2012). Emotional sensitivity and intellectual playfulness set them apart from an average student of their age. They have extreme curiosity about ideas, events, objects and situations. Their intellectual complexity makes these students being out of step of the age and intellectual capability of their age peers and classmates. As analytical thinkers, they excel in critical examination of ideas and things happening in front of them. It is necessary to handle these students carefully so that they can tackle their intellectual complexity in an effective way. Affective characteristics of intellectually gifted students Intellectually gifted students have different characteristics related to cognitive characteristics, affective, physical and societal characteristics. Cognitive characteristics are related to thinking, for instance, retaining large amount of information, high level of verbal ability and development of language, high curiosity and varying interests. Affective characteristics are related to feeling in which there is presence of unusual sensitivity to the feelings of others, a high level of self-awareness, a good sense of