Twice-exceptional students with specific learning difficulties have high intellectual abilities as well as coexisting learning difficulties. Their characteristics are the result of interactions between their potentials and weaknesses, and daily confrontations with both exceptionalities often lead to academic problems, as well as socio-emotional problems. While support planning, it is crucial to take into account the uniqueness of each student and to pay attention to their strong areas as well as their social and emotional needs.
Emotional competency is a manifestation of emotional intelligence and it describes appropriate or inappropriate forms of behavior and characteristics of individual's socio-emotional functioning. There are two main research traditions of emotional intelligence. Mayer and Salovey's mental ability model considers emotional intelligence as a mental ability, while Goleman's and Bar-On's mixed models consider it as a combination of an individual's personality traits.
In our study we focused on emotional competency of twice-exceptional students with learning difficulties and how often they encounter certain social and emotional problems. We compared these findings with the findings of their gifted peers without learning difficulties, peers with learning difficulties and non-gifted peers without learning difficulties. The study was carried out using a quantitive research approach, and descriptive and causal non-experimental research methods were used. TEIQue-ASF questionnaire was used for calculating the global trait emotional competency score, and a self-assessment scale was used to determine the frequency of socio-emotional problems.
The results showed that gifted peers without learning difficulties on average scored the highest on the global trait emotional competency scale. Twice-exceptional students with learning difficulties on average scored slightly lower, followed by non-gifted peers without learning difficulties and peers with learning difficulties, who scored the lowest on average. The calculation of statistical significance showed no statistically significant differences between twice-exceptional students with learning difficulties and the remaining subsamples of respondents. Twice-exceptional students with learning difficulties most often encounter problems related to perfectionism, failure, and emotional distress, and to a lesser extent problems related to self-control, motivation, relationships and social skills. Their gifted peers without learning difficulties and non-gifted peers without learning difficulties also most often encounter problems related to perfectionism and failure, while their peers with learning difficulties most frequently encounter problems related to self-control and motivation. All subsamples of respondents least frequently encounter problems related to relationships and social skills. The calculations showed statistically significant differences between twice-exceptional students with learning difficulties and their non-gifted peers without learning difficulties in only two items; namely, non-gifted peers without learning difficulties are less often critical of their achievements and less often feel different from their peers.
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