Gifted students’ attitudes towards history lessons based on gender and grade level

The field of gifted education has a long history. It is also a very crucial issue for the development of societies. Many educators and researchers have been interested in analyzing the high ability students’ world. There are many studies conducted to understand gifted students’ needs. These students need special programs; and educators should take into consideration their learning styles and abilities when they establish programs and create materials. Conducting attitudes studies provide a good starting point for educators who wish to introduce suitable programs or lessons to students. The purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate the differences on gifted students’ attitudes toward history lessons taught in high schools in Turkey based on gender and grade level. The sample consisted of 133 gifted students in grades prep–12 (approximately 14–18 years of age) in TEV Inanç Turkeş High School. It is a boarding school in Turkey that accepts only gifted students for enrollment. Likert attitude scale was designed and used to measure the attitudes towards the study of history in high school students. Before applying this scale on the main target group, a pilot study was carried out in order to test the reliability and validation of the scale. For the statistical analysis of the data, SPSS Statistics 23 (IBM) and SPSS AMOS 23 (IBM) were used. The results of this study indicated that there are no significant differences between gifted female and male students’ attitudes towards history lessons. But the grade level of students had a significant effect on attitudes towards history lessons. This study showed that 10thgrade students show more positive attitudes toward history lessons than the other grades