Despite the terminological confusion that reigns in the field of giftedness and heterogeneity of talented pupils, giftedness is definitely common to all of them. Pupils spend a lot of time in schools, which means that teachers know them very well and they create expectations for pupils based on their own experiences and beliefs. In line with these expectations, teachers can lead pupils to self-fulfilling prophecy, which is reflected in the pupil's perception of reality.
In this master's thesis, we investigated the influence of expectations of primary school teachers for identified gifted pupils, teachers' expectations about personality characteristics of gifted pupils and differences in these expectations for three groups: gifted pupils, pupils with excellent academic success and for twice exceptional pupils.
The quantitative research was carried out by using the questionnaire in the traditional form and online on a sample of 132 teachers, employed at primary schools in Slovenia in the school year 2016/2017. We have set four research questions that relate to the personality traits of gifted pupils, the differences in teachers' expectations for gifted pupils, pupils with excellent academic success and for twice exceptional pupils. We examined also the differences in teachers' expectations for schoolboys and schoolgirls and the myths about gifted pupils. With the help of inferential statistics three hypotheses were confirmed, but we rejected the hypothesis about equality of teachers' expectations for gifted pupils and for pupils with outstanding academic success, because we found out that teachers have higher expectations for pupils with excellent academic success than to gifted pupils in certain areas.
We found out that teachers mainly expect gifted pupils to develop their own system of values that pupils take into account in their daily lives, and that gifted pupils mainly act on their own initiative to develop their own potential, whereby motivation plays a key role. It is therefore important that teachers and educators in primary schools talk to pupils about values, and at the same time, they encourage them, support and motivate them in different ways for different activities.
Based on the results obtained, practitioners in primary schools can be even more encouraged to communicate with pupils and to further education on the characteristics of gifted pupils, as this expanding the field of understanding the needs of gifted pupils in the school. Above all, teachers should assess their own work and methods that are used daily in working with all pupils, through self-evaluation.
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