Parallel Session Proceedings »
3.8.5 Self-Regulated Learning Strategies for Twice Exceptional Learners
Educating gifted and talented children is a big challenge for the educational system, especially when giftedness is occurring in combination with various disabilities or minority backgrounds. Those twice exceptional learners often show a combination of high abilities and disabilities, behavioral or learning difficulties, social disadvantaged or migration backgrounds. This presentation will focus on gifted and talented children with learning difficulties, social disadvantaged or migration backgrounds often combined with underachievement. The aim is to support those persons in their strengths, as well as in their weaknesses. While successful learning processes require effective strategies of self-regulated learning like cognitive, meta-cognitive and motivational-volitional strategies, twice/multiple exceptional learners need special instruction adequate to their specific profiles and learning styles. This requires adaptive strategies of information processing, learning process control and self-regulation using the personal strengths to cope with the individual weaknesses in order to transform their high potential into excellent performance in different domains.
The presentation will analyze different strategy-oriented programs of self-regulated learning of the International Center for the Study of Giftedness (e.g. Learning Strategy Courses, Challenge and Support Projects) especially for twice exceptional children (e.g. gifted dyslexic children) or talented children with minority backgrounds (e.g. social disadvantaged children). These learning strategy-oriented programs inside and outside schools aim to improve learning competencies as well as school achievement of those children and are evaluated in empirical studies via different qualitative and quantitative methods (e.g. adapted questionnaires, pretest-posttest-comparisons). Results mainly show significant improvement of specific learning competencies and school achievement in special subjects, which verified the effectiveness of self-regulated learning strategies for twice exceptional children. In conclusion strategies of self-regulated learning could be implemented via adaptive teacher training and further education combined with professional, diagnostic, didactic and communicative competencies.