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14 Gifted and Faced with a Problem: The Ase of (Meta)Cognitive and Affective Strategies
Despite their importance, the metacognitive skills of a staggering 45% of gifted students in the Netherlands are poorly developed. A possible reason for this is that gifted students are not regularly confronted with tasks they find difficult. Therefore, they must be actively taught metacognitive skills by being repeatedly confronted with difficult tasks (Veenman, 2015).
Translation is a complex task involving a high level of problem solving (Angelone, 2010). The complexity of translation makes Latin an interesting opportunity to teach and monitor metacognitive skills among gifted students, particularly as Dutch secondary schools often teach Latin to specifically high-achievers and potentials.
To be able to utilize the opportunities Latin lessons present for training metacognitive skills, it is necessary to investigate how gifted students approach a translation task. However, an insight into their use of metacognitive strategies is not enoug: translating also involves many cognitive strategies. In addition to this, as Yoon (2009) points out, the affective side must always be taken into consideration with gifted children. Therefore, this study not only focuses on mapping out which (meta)cognitive strategies third year Latin students use during a difficult translation task, but also how the students are affected when not able to immediatly solve a task.
To do so, 16 students were asked to translate three sets of three Latin sentences whilst thinking aloud and this was followed by a post-interview. To determine if the students have a production or availability deficiency (Veenman, Kerseboom & Imthorn, 2000), the middle three sentences were not actual coherent Latin sentences. The hypothesis was that the students would show a wider range of (meta)cognitive strategies in the untranslatable sentences and that the students would approach the last three sentences differently to the first ones. Between tasks the students were asked to point out which emoji best suited their mood and to give themselves mark for how well they felt they had done.
Two coders independently coded the think-aloud tasks and the interviews (κ = .824). A first analysis shows that a significantly shorter amount of time was spent on the sentences after being the untranslatable sentences than before (F= (df2,47) F(12,44) P= <.001) and that all the students prefer cognitive strategies when approaching a problem to metacognitive ones, some even rely wholly on their cognitive skills. The ongoing analysis focusses on patterns within the used strategies and how the students themselves seem affected by the untranslatable task.