Promotion of the gifted

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Promotion of gifted students is the support of learners who have been identified as being exceptionally gifted (for example, highly gifted ). The aim is to stimulate the development of the potential of these learners and to accompany them in the best possible way.

The promotion of talented students is part of the talent promotion scheme. While gifted education concentrates on a specific group of learners, gifted education deals with all learners who can be assumed to have undeveloped potential.

Occasionally, the concept of talent development is interpreted purely in monetary terms and understood as promoting particularly high-performing learners, usually in the form of grants or scholarships .

Promotion of talented students in Germany

Promotion of talented students in Germany

In the public perception, the promotion of talented students in Germany mainly consists of state-funded study grants , which are awarded by the gifted support organizations in the form of grants to particularly high-performing students . However, there are also around 2,100 other scholarship providers. In the summer of 2011, the federal government also launched the Germany Scholarship, which enables universities to use federal funds and half of the private funds raised by them to support selected students of all nationalities with a monthly grant of € 300.

Information portals such as the free and voluntarily operated database mystipendium.de or the scholarship guide of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research now offer an overview of the scarcely manageable landscape of gifted scholarships.

It is criticized that the promotion of talented students does not exhaust their potential: Even high school graduates or students with a very good profile only apply between a quarter and a third for a scholarship. Even with the Deutschlandstipendium (as of 2012), the announced expectations were far from being met: Originally 160,000 students or eight percent of all students were to be funded by the Deutschlandstipendium. As of the end of May 2012, there were only 5,400 students.

Promotion of talented students in Germany

For students there are ways of gifted education, especially competitions, Hochbegabten- and special schools and specialized camps . There are various competitions for gifted students: Young Scientist , Federal Foreign Language Competition , National Competition Mathematics , Mathematical Olympiad , Chemistry Olympiad , Physics Olympiad , Biology Olympiad , Philosophy Olympiad , Federal Competition computer science , Young Musicians , debated youth , Adam Ries competition .

The state of North Rhine-Westphalia started a project in 2010 (with seven grammar schools and three elementary schools; more schools were added in 2012); it is called 'Network for the Promotion of Highly Talented NRW'.

In Bavaria, too, there are now eight grammar schools that offer special classes for particularly talented pupils from the 5th grade onwards. In cooperation with the Karg Foundation Frankfurt am Main and the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture, Science and Art and the eVOCATIOn further education institute (Würzburg), these are to be expanded into competence centers for the promotion of gifted children by autumn 2016 as part of the Karg Campus School Bavaria project .

In Rhineland-Palatinate there are currently four high school schools with support for highly gifted students from grade 5: These are the Heinrich-Heine Gymnasium in Kaiserslautern, the Max-von-Laue Gymnasium in Koblenz, the Otto-Schott Gymnasium in Mainz and the Auguste-Viktoria Gymnasium in Trier connected. The first school for the gifted started in Rhineland Palatinate in the 2003/2004 school year.

Some grammar schools offer special gifted classes from the 6th grade onwards. There are some state boarding schools for the gifted: in Hesse the upper level high school Schloss Hansenberg , in Saxony the Sankt Afra zu Meißen , in Baden-Württemberg the state high school in Schwäbisch Gmünd and in Saxony-Anhalt the state school Pforta .

There are also numerous schools with subject-specific funding for gifted students (some in special school parts or special classes):

Various organizations offer summer camps to promote talented students. This includes:

Investigations into the efficiency of existing gifted promotion programs ( education controlling ) have only been carried out sporadically in Germany.

Other offers

For highly talented underachievers , for example with paused or dropped out of training, the Dr. Farassat Foundation of the F&K Delvotec founder of the same name and the Quantenspringer agency that emerged from it offer project- and design-thinking- based (re) integration into the profession - and social life and mediate highly talented teams and companies with interdisciplinary issues from professional practice. The foundation has been working increasingly with the Technical University of Munich since 2019 .

Promotion of talented students in the GDR

In the GDR there were various institutions in which talented students were promoted.

The most famous and oldest institutions are the Russian schools, to which schools with other extensions were added later. There were special schools for students who were gifted in mathematics and science in almost all districts of the GDR . Most of them are now grammar schools with a special profile, for example the Heinrich-Hertz-Gymnasium in Berlin or the Wilhelm-Ostwald-Gymnasium in Leipzig. Some “survived” as special school parts, e.g. B. at the Albert-Schweitzer-Gymnasium in Erfurt. There were also special classes at the extended high schools.

With the establishment of the special chemistry classes in 1964, the first time at a university in the GDR (as was usually only the case in the USA until then ; see junior studies ), the training of highly talented students began, who were also employed in the university's research operations before they graduated from high school were involved. In the mid-1960s, further special classes for mathematics and physics were created at the universities of Berlin, Halle and Rostock as well as the technical universities of Karl-Marx-Stadt and Magdeburg. These special classes were subordinate to the Ministry of Higher Education and Technical Education and not (like e.g. the special schools) to the Ministry of Public Education.

Particularly mathematical and scientific talents were intensively promoted outside of the classroom in study groups, clubs and correspondence circles and determined through school, district and district Olympiads.

The stations of young natural scientists and technicians represented a special form , at which talented people in mathematics and areas of natural sciences could train themselves. In the 1970s, mathematical student societies were founded in which talented students were supported by university mathematicians. There were also special classes for chemistry . After the fall of the Wall , the GDR school system was aligned with that of the Federal Republic; such establishments were gradually closed except for a few.

Promotion of talented students in Austria

Promotion of talented students in Austria

In principle, a distinction can be made between support approaches within the school organization and support programs outside of school.

Promotion of talented students within the school

Individualization & differentiation in regular lessons

Students are taught according to their interests, strengths and talents. The following approaches, among others, offer possibilities for this:

  • Curriculum Compacting: The requirements of the curriculum are individually adapted by compressing the subject matter for a student or for a group, or taking it through in a shorter period of time or developing it independently (also outside of class). The time gained can be used for additional talent-enhancing courses.
  • Revolving door model : This enables gifted students to remove themselves from the regular lessons of a subject or several subjects for a limited time in order to e.g. B. to dedicate to a project. It is advisable to conclude a learning contract for this, in which the exact modalities are specified.
  • Mentoring & Tutoring: Students are accompanied in their learning by experienced people. This can include content-related as well as organizational or metacognitive areas. Gifted students can benefit both passively (e.g. by supporting them with their own research) and actively as tutors.
Accelerating support measures

The aim is to enable accelerated learning:

  • Early school enrollment: At the request of their legal guardians, children who are not yet of school age can, under certain conditions, be admitted to the first grade at the beginning of a school year.
  • Skipping school levels: Since 2006 it has been possible not only to skip a class within a school type, but also to do this at a joint (ie from one school type to another).
  • Partial jumping: Participation in individual lessons at a higher school level
Enrichment

This is understood to mean in-depth or additional offers. examples for this are

  • Pullout courses (during class time as alternative courses) or talent development courses
  • Enrichment teams (cross-grade interest groups who work together on a project of their own choosing)

There are also some schools such as B. the BG / BRG Keimgasse Mödling , in which model classes for particularly gifted children were set up. These are mostly "express train classes", ie the contents of the curriculum are dealt with in a shorter time. In addition, in some schools entire branches of the school were devoted to the promotion of talented and talented people. This is e.g. B. the case in Wiedner Gymnasium in Vienna. In this school, an upper school class is being run as a Sir Karl Popper School for the particularly gifted in the form of a school experiment. In the vocational higher education system, there are special commercial academies in the commercial area for more willing, more capable and talented students, e.g. B. the talent-promoting Schumpeter branch at the Schumpeter Handelsakademie Wien 13 or the Vienna Business School HAK Wien Schönborngasse with the HAK Plus.

Extracurricular support offers

In the extracurricular area, some museums, sports clubs, music clubs etc. also have interesting offers for particularly talented children and young people.

Furthermore, particularly talented and interested students For example, as part of the program, students at universities can attend courses at universities as extraordinary listeners, which are fully credited to them when they study later.

High school students can also take part in Olympics and competitions in the fields of natural sciences, humanities, technology, new media, music and sport, thereby deepening their special interests.

In the federal states there are numerous associations for the promotion of particularly talented children and young people who provide support offers. Summer academies and pull-out courses are often organized during the major holidays. Some examples of initiatives in the federal states:

In Upper Austria there is the Association for Talents Foundation, which is actively supported by the state of Upper Austria, as well as by business and industry. The association organizes 3 summer academies, some Olympics and numerous projects every year. The state school board for Upper Austria has set up the Traunsee Castle Talent Academy, where so-called “pull-out” courses lasting three to five days for highly talented students are held by (ECHA) teachers during the school year. There is also the International Academy Traunkirchen under the direction of the quantum physicist Prof. Anton Zeilinger . Schoolchildren from the lower grades are invited to one-day events with a focus on natural sciences; The IAT also offers offers for talented and interested students.

In Carinthia, the inizia association works closely with the state school board and also maintains contact with the Ministry of Education.

The Education Directorate for Lower Austria, together with the Association for the Promotion of Gifted and Highly Gifted Schoolchildren from Lower Austria, organizes intensive courses on the scale of a school week in the newly formed Talent Center Schloss Drosendorf. Specially trained teachers work with selected students on special topics that are also available after the course as part of e-learning packages.

Summer academies

These take place in several federal states:

  • Four summer academies with a focus on natural sciences took place in Vienna in 2006. For the first time there was a successful combination between the phenomena of cooking and the natural sciences. Children between 6 and 10 years of age cooked, experimented and were looked after by experts.
  • For more than 20 years, Lower Austria has been offering well-attended international summer academies for elementary school, middle and upper school students.
  • Upper Austria has been organizing summer academies for upper levels for ten years, for seven years for 10 to 14 year olds and for five years for 8 to 10 year olds.
  • Carinthia: The Talentecamp is a summer academy for talented and particularly interested students at AHS and BMHS in Carinthia. Technical college, university, association for the promotion of talented students, educational institute and state school board have been cooperating since 2000 to implement this project annually.

In addition to this model for the upper school, Future kids , a summer camp for lower school students, is also currently being established .

Promotion of talented students in Austria

Support measures for gifted students include opportunities for acceleration, enrichment and financial support. The following initiatives vary from location to location.

Accelerating measures

  • Early admission to the course: new students will be registered at the beginning of July, which enables them to attend a summer university, for example
  • Advance courses

Enrichment

  • Project teams made up of senior researchers, junior researchers and students
  • Stays abroad
  • Participation in competitions
  • Mentoring programs

Financial support

  • Merit scholarships
  • Thesis prices

There is currently a gifted support organization ( Pro Scientia ) in Austria that supports around 120 students.

Promotion of talented students in Switzerland

At the tertiary level, a certain degree of gradation between universities is often pointed out. The federal technical colleges are considered to be intellectually more demanding than the corresponding courses at the regular, cantonal universities, or the University of St. Gallen as particularly challenging for business and social courses .

In addition, the Swiss Study Foundation is becoming increasingly important.

Promotion of talented students in the USA

schools

In the United States , where there are no different types of school such as grammar schools, secondary schools and secondary schools, and where pupils with special educational needs also receive integrative schooling , teachers are far more prepared than in Germany, for example, to put pupils with very different performance in one and the other teaching in the same class. American teachers have a wide range of freedom to let gifted children work with more demanding tasks than the curriculum actually provides. The many competitions in which American students can take part are a particular challenge for gifted children .

Many schools also have enrichment programs in which children with high IQs can be accepted from grade 2 onwards. These children are taken out of the class by the hour and taught in small groups by a special teacher ( enrichment teacher ). A widespread alternative to educational enrichment is the skipping of grade levels ( educational acceleration , grade skipping ), which has many critics in the USA because the children concerned may be able to cope with a learning environment with older classmates academically, but not socially and emotionally. Many families also prefer a private school for their gifted children or have them exempt from compulsory schooling and give them home schooling . At high schools (mostly grades 9-12) there is often the opportunity to teach highly gifted people more in Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses, where some college-level curriculum is offered, while those with average talent are placed in standard courses become.

Education policy in the USA is a matter of the federal states , so that to this day there is only one law on the promotion of gifted children - the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act , which came into force in 1988 and has been amended several times since then - but this is based on the specification general guidelines limited. In 2002, 37 of the American states had their own laws on the promotion of talented students, on the basis of which there is a wide range of programs and special schools, including As the Education Program for Gifted Youth of Stanford University , the Center for Talented Youth of the Johns Hopkins University and the Highly Gifted Magnet Program in Los Angeles .

Highly gifted students are generally held in high regard among their peers. This is especially true of white children; African American children sometimes find school success a stigma. The German swear word "Streber" has no equivalent in English.

Extracurricular support offers

Gifted students, especially gifted high school students, can attend special summer camps in the U.S. B. be organized by universities.

For instrumental students - especially those who receive their lessons at a music school or a cultural center - are in the US private scholarships ( scholarships ) are available which can often be taken already in primary school age to complete.

Colleges

In the USA, gifted students are also promoted by universities, which, in a tough competition for the best students, attract them with some very well-funded scholarships. There are also a large number of private and state foundations, as well as ministries, some of which, because of the high tuition fees, carry out the funding in cooperation with the respective university. Historically, the promotion of the gifted in the USA has been favored by the pronounced willingness to donate to philanthropists, partly also inspired by American tax legislation. Because of the multiethnic social structure, there are also a large number of programs in the USA that specifically promote ethnic minorities .

The most important independent grant providers for college students ( undergraduate students ) are:

  • US National Merit Corporation
  • Siemens Foundation (via Siemens Competition )
  • Intel (via the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair and Intel Science Talent Search )

The most important scholarship providers for people with a bachelor's degree ( graduate students ) are:

  • National Science Foundation with their Graduate Research Fellowship Program
  • National Research Council with the Ford Foundation Fellowship for Ethnic Minorities
  • Department of Defense with the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship

The National Science Foundation scholarship in particular is considerably more endowed than comparable scholarships from Germany and is also able to cover a large part of the substantial tuition fees at American private universities .

Some colleges offer an early entrance program; H. Access for the gifted long before the end of regular school time.

See also

literature

  • C. Solzbacher, G. Weigand, P. Schreiber (Eds.): Promotion of talent controversial? Concepts reflected in inclusion. Beltz, Weinheim / Basel 2015, ISBN 978-3-407-25719-2 .

Web links

Germany

Austria

Switzerland

Others

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. mystipendium.de
  2. ↑ Allensbach Study 2010: Great need - little funding. Study financing 2010 .
  3. ↑ The “Germany Scholarship” is only available for 0.2 percent. In: Der Tagesspiegel. May 31, 2012.
  4. ^ Minister Löhrmann: New impulses for the promotion of particularly talented pupils. ( Memento from September 1, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) Press release , July 8, 2013. at: schulministerium.nrw.de www.karg-stiftung.de
  5. ↑ Information from the Bavarian Ministry of Culture on the gifted classes
  6. ↑ Press release of the Bavarian Ministry of Culture of January 28, 2015, information from the Karg Foundation on the Karg Campus School Bavaria project
  7. ^ Promotion of gifted students: Gymnasiums: Bildungsserver Rheinland-Pfalz. Retrieved December 19, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Objectives / school concept - Heinrich Heine Gymnasium. Retrieved December 19, 2019 .
  9. ^ German Schoolchildren Academy
  10. ^ Youth education in society and science eV
  11. ↑ German Junior Academy (DJA)
  12. ^ Mathematics Academy of Youth Education in Society and Science eV ( Memento from June 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ^ Mathematics specialist camp of the Leipzig Student Society for Mathematics ( Memento from July 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ Student Academy Mathematics of the Root eV
  15. ↑ Physics summer at the TU Ilmenau
  16. ↑ Göttingen math camp
  17. ↑ Martin Spiewak: Gifted: Hopping like jumping . In: The time . September 7, 2016 ( online ).
  18. ↑ Home. In: Quantum Jumper. Quantenspringer eK, accessed on January 28, 2020 .
  19. ↑ Home. In: Dr. Farassat Foundation. Foundation for the integration of gifted people into professional and social life and the promotion of students. Retrieved January 28, 2020 .
  20. ^ Association Talente Foundation ( Memento from February 2, 2017 in the Internet Archive ).
  21. ↑ International Academy Traunkirchen
  22. ^ Association for the promotion of talented and talented people in Carinthia .
  23. ↑ Education Directorate for Lower Austria
  24. ↑ Talent Center Schloss Drosendorf
  25. ↑ Summer academies
  26. ↑ Talent camp
  27. ^ Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act. ( Memento from April 5, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) Gifted education
  28. ^ Princeton University ; Stanford University
  29. ^ US National Merit Corporation
  30. ^ National Science Foundation
  31. ^ Graduate Research Fellowship Program
  32. ^ National Research Council
  33. ^ Ford Foundation Fellowship ( Memento from April 22, 2009 in the web archive archive.today )
  34. ↑ National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship ( Memento from December 20, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )