Abstract Graphic Creativity, Feelings about School, and Engagement in the School Environment: What Are the Interindividual Differences between Gifted and Non-Gifted Children?

Abstract

This study examines interindividual differences between gifted and non-gifted children in the school environment. Three distinct measurement tools were used to enable a multimodal approach of gifted and non-gifted children with abstract graphic creativity, feelings about school and engagement in the school environment being considered. The results obtained from 328 children (including 45 gifted children) revealed that the gifted children obtained scores significantly higher than non-gifted children in terms of self-determination, feelings about school, and creativity. In addition, a gap appears among gifted children between their significantly higher scores for motivation and intellectual skills versus standard scores for their socio-affective development. Such results are consistent with the idea of asynchronous development, which is characteristic of gifted children (cognitive and conative vs. socio-affective sphere), offering perspectives for more adapted support for these pupils in elementary school.

Development of a New Scale to Assess Students’ Autodetermination At School (AAS)

“…Finally, there is a trend evolution between the AAS score and the child level: the child's commitment increases slowly each year from first grade to third and fourth grade, before falling back in fifth grade. This trend has been confirmed in another study we conducted with this scale, for the sub-dimension F2-PT (i.e., associated with the teacher-student relationship) [3].…”

“…The relevance of asking children directly about their experiences of commitment in school to examine whether teacher observation is correlated with children's perceptions of their commitment in school has been already investigated in a recent study. In this study, using the French FAS [30] and the AAS, an interesting gap between gifted students and teacher perception of their relationship has been revealed that has not been observed for non-gifted students [3]. Incidentally, this result confirms the interest of the existence of this scale to study inter-individual differences in commitment at school, in the field of differential psychology.…”

“…Considering intelligence and the development of potentialities leads in fact to an interest in commitment. According to the three-ring theory [2], commitment is crucial as one of the three components along with aptitudes and creativity that contributes dynamically to the optimal development of an individual's intelligence [2][3][4]. In this sense, the self-determination Theory (SDT) of Ryan and Deci [5,6] appears fundamental in understanding the multidimensional concept of commitment through the prism of psychology.…”

“…For each of these dimensions of the SDT, there are at least three items that are proposed to elaborate the structure of our scale (Table 1). (3,5,7,10) The first dimension could bring together four items: item 3 (interest for schoolwork), item 5 (pleasure to learn), item 7 (autonomy) and item 10 (perseverance). Those items refer to the learner's autonomous motivation by exploring notions like interest, pleasure, autonomy and tenacity.…”

Is Creativity Expressed at Home Related to Creativity Expressed at School? A Re-Examination of the Creativity Gap with Gifted and Nongifted Students

“…There are several reasons to suspect that the gap between creativity at school and creativity at home would be smaller for the gifted sample. First, evidence suggests that gifted students typically display more creative thinking than their nongifted peers (Abdulla Alabbasi et al, 2021a;American Psychological Association, 2017;Davis et al, 2011;Renzulli, 2005;Sanchez & Blanc, 2023a). This may provide them with robust creative tendencies that are more stable across contexts.…”