Üstün Zekâlı Öğrencilerin Fen Bilimlerine Özgü Yeteneklerinin Değerlendirilmesi: Bir Test Geliştirme Çalışması

Abstract

Various measurement instruments (intelligence tests, general ability tests, academic tests and scales) have been developed in order to identify gifted individuals in our country and in the world. Although these instruments provided important data for diagnosis, they provided information about the various characteristics of individuals, but they had limitations in providing information about skills specific to different disciplines. Following a diagnosis for gifted individuals, the need to design a suitable educational program for those individuals arises and the aim is to place the diagnosed individual into a suitable program. However, education programs are frequently planned for a single discipline due to their limitations in time, effort and cost. These situations led to limitations in educations programs applied to various disciplines including mathematics, science, technology and engineering departments. In this context, a diagnostic process focused only on intelligence tests and success tests and scales does not provide detailed information about developing a detailed discipline-specific education program. For this reason, the development and use of discipline-specific ability tests might fill an important gap. Hence the aim of this study is to develop a skill test that can be used in the assessment of the science-specific abilities of students diagnosed as "gifted" studying in 5-8 classes. 338 students from 5th-7th grade participated in the research. Among these students, there are 12 students in the 5th grade, 56 students in the 6th grade, and 7 students in the 7th grade who were diagnosed as gifted. Construct validity data obtained confirmed the one-factor structure. Moreover, a difference was found between the upper- and lower-class groups in the favor of the upper groups in terms of test scores. The Cronbach Alpha reliability value of the scores obtained from the 28-item inventory was determined as 0.87. The validity and reliability findings obtained show that the scores obtained from the measurement tool can be used for research and evaluation purposes.