Pre-service Teachers’ Metaphors About Giftedness and Talent

Abstract

Definitions in the minds of people who are interested in the concepts of giftedness and talent, directly or indirectly affect attitudes, perspectives and educational policies towards gifted individuals and educations. In this study, the implicit theories on the concepts of giftedness and talent (the concepts in their minds) were examined via the metaphors they formed about these concepts with a
phenomenological approach. In the 2016-2017 academic year, 279 pre-service teachers selected from two different universities in cities in the north-west and inner western parts of Turkey were selected with appropriate sampling. Pre-service teachers were expected to produce appropriate metaphors in two separate sentences related to the concept of giftedness and talent like “Giftedness/Talent is like…; because…”. When the metaphors developed by pre-service teachers were examined, it was seen that 207 metaphors were produced for giftedness and 181 for talent. The analysis of the metaphors obtained by the content analysis method yielded 13 common categories. High frequently mentioned metaphor categories for both participants' giftedness and talent concepts, respectively; appropriate environment (21.3%; 22.1%), high performance (15%; 21.5%) and different from their peers (10.1%; 13.8%) were determined to produce metaphors in the categories. The participants produced categories close to each other for the concepts of giftedness and talent in all categories but the differences in the categories of high performance (15%; 21.5%), infinite (7.2%; 2.8%) and wide information capacity (8.7%; 0.6%) categories were more pronounced. It could be said that the categories of infinite and broad information capacity were associated with the concept of giftedness and the high performance category was more associated with the concept of talent. In addition, it was concluded that the participants mostly gave similar meanings to giftedness and talent, and that they use the concepts in place of each other.