Gifted students differ from typical students in terms of learning style, depth and complexity of understanding. Among the different strategies to teach science to gifted students, critical thinking is considered to be an important component. It is vital to teach and hone critical thinking skills since it acts as an important foundation for higher education. While research on gifted education has focused on different instructional strategies to teach sciences, there is limited data published on effectiveness of chemistry education to gifted students. There is an imminent need to design effective assessment strategies and novel instructional activities that challenge and invigorate gifted students while simultaneously teaching them the importance of critical thinking.<br/><br/>NGSS incorporates academic rigor into the learning for students and educators can employ a variety of strategies to ensure gifted learners are motivated such as (1) accelerated learning, (2) differentiation of content (3) Critical thinking and (4) Design-based research. This presentation will focus on the use of these strategies in gifted education involving NGSS.<br/><br/>To help educators teach gifted children effectively, faculty from a university were involved in designing a year-long curriculum for elementary and middle school students in a public gifted school in Ohio. In chemistry, gifted students learnt new chemical concepts while simultaneously performing laboratory experiments in a university chemistry lab. Faculty interacted with students every week and met with teachers to design workplans, activities and laboratory experiments for gifted students. This presentation will also summarize results from student assessments of knowledge, understanding of content and critical thinking abilities.

Chemistry education for gifted students with the next generation science standards (NGSS)

251st National Meeting (2016)

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