It was a goal of this study to identify factors affecting African-American enrollment and intent to enroll in an advanced placement program and other select variables such as prior course work, teacher expectations, academic motivation, peer affiliation, counselor advisement, teacher perception, and student self-efficacy. Pearson correlations, ANOVA, Post Hoc and regression tests were used to analyze the data that had the greatest significance on African-American enrollment in an advanced placement program. The researcher concluded that teacher expectations, peer affiliation, and student intent to enroll have the greatest significance on African-American enrollment in an advanced placement program. Recommendations were suggested for classroom teachers, educational leaders, and future researchers.

My thesis focuses on the subject of 'education of athletically talented students' on a theoretical and empirical level. The theoretical part describes 'talent' on a general basis followed by a specific description of a 'sporting talent'. It considers the conditions of education of talented students without a particular focus and subsequently discusses the subject of school education of athletically talented students. It introduces the specific aspects of an athlete as a pupil, the factors that influence his/her educational path and the problem of 'dual career'. It also characterizes the conditions of education of athletes in Europe and the system of education in the Czech Republic. The theoretical part is the resource for conducting the empirical part, where the results show how athletes themselves describe and evaluate the conditions of school education. The reaserch of investigated topic whilst using thorough interviews concludes the way athletes perceive this issue.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship of honors education to student success by comparing honors-eligible community college students who met requirements to academically matched peers who opted out of honors participation. Honors program participation was defined as completing 12 or more credit hours of honors-level course work. The population for this study included 452 honors-eligible participants with 95 honors participants (HPs) and 357 non-participants (NPs) from a community college in Tennessee. The sampling frame was generated using a five-year participation window from 2008 through 2013. Propensity score matching alleviated the threat to validity for self-selection bias by controlling for confounding variables such as high school GPA, dual-enrollment participation, ACT score, declared major, community college GPA upon first term of eligibility, parental income, parental education, gender, and age. Major findings of the study were: honors program participants (a) earned a significantly higher numerical final course grade in Composition II, a first-year writing course; (b) earned significantly higher cumulative GPAs the second semester after honors eligibility; (c) earned significantly higher cumulative GPAs upon completion; (d) were significantly more likely to graduate. Conclusions generated from the data analyses indicate that honors education benefits community college students and provide empirical support for increased investment in community college honors education, especially for high-achieving students experiencing poverty. Low-income students were defined as those students receiving the maximum federal Pell Grant award provided to undergraduate students with financial need. Within the study sample, it was determined that 50% of NPs met the low-income threshold whereas 47% of HPs were identified as low-income. These participation rates suggest that more low-income high-achieving students who could substantially benefit from participating in honors are participating less. Further empirical research studies and policy levers should identify ways to increase honors participation for low-income, high-achieving students.

This study focused on how teachers' planning and teaching methods changed after they acquired more confidence in applying differentiated strategies in their instructional units. Teachers were given a questionnaire about their skills, qualifications and teaching beliefs comparing teaching general education students and gifted education students within the typical classroom setting. Then teachers received several professional development opportunities within the school year exposing them to different forms of differentiation. Time was given between trainings so that teachers would have ample time to integrate what they learned into their planning and instructional design. At the end of the study, teachers were given another questionnaire, similar to the first one, where they had to rank themselves on skills, education, and teaching methods for general education students and gifted students after the professional development. Comparisons between the two questionnaires showed that teachers were more confident in how to meet individual students' needs through differentiation after the trainings than before the study. In fact, before the study, 50% of teachers reported that the needs of gifted students are not being met in the general classroom setting; but, after the study, that number dropped to only 6%. Because teachers felt more confident in their abilities to teach gifted students in the traditional classrooms, the students' needs were addressed.

This qualitative dissertation study examined the ways that nine gifted, bilingual Mexican/Mexican-American students negotiated paradoxes in their academic, linguistic, and cultural identities in a public high school in a large, south central Texas city. One theoretical lens, Critical Race Theory/Latino Critical Race Theory (CRT/LatCrit) was combined with phenomenological research methods to privilege the students' perspectives during the data collection process. An additional theoretical lens, the concept of Figured Worlds, was used to contextualize the setting, Chase High School. Both CRT/LatCrit and Figured Worlds were used to analyze interview, classroom and field observation, participant, school, and district artifacts, federal, state and local data collected over ten months of study. The investigation revealed that the participants braided the domains of community cultural wealth -- aspirational, navigational, linguistic, social, resistance, and familial capital -- into practices that grounded them in their bilingual, bicultural Mexican/Mexican-American identities as successful students. / text

The autism treatment status quo was reviewed and accompanied by a narrative contextualizing past and present progress with my younger brother Jim’s journey with the condition, sharing proposed next steps for bettering the current state of affairs in the space. The impetus for this piece was to share in the lessons of Jim’s life thus far and the revelations of those who have supported him, as well as to determine ways to create more impactful, lasting change in the limited window of early intervention therapy whilst empowering individuals on the spectrum to optimize for their skills and talents rather than just simply mitigating the downsides of autism spectrum disorder. Feedback as to how to improve the prevailing course of treatment: (education and therapy) was solicited by leading experts in the fields of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), Electroencephalography (EEG), and autism more generally in the context of politics, insurability, and savant syndrome and splinter skills. The advice of the various vertical experts were synthesized and distilled into a new proposed course of treatment which were submitted to all respective experts for further feedback and review prior to publication. It was discovered that there is significant feedback to suggest that the prevailing wisdom that splinter skills and savant syndrome are found in a small minority of individuals with autism spectrum disorder may not be true and that further research is warranted that would implement the new proposed course of treatment and attempt to unlock the talents and gifts of these individuals consistent with the success we encountered raising Jim. While our methods were resource-intensive and conducted manually with many hours of intensive in-home therapy, there is significant feedback to suggest that a technology-driven approach to reforming autism treatment would achieve same or greater results with far fewer resources in the near and long term. By unlocking the greatest minds of our society (the majority of savants have historically been autistic) to take on the greatest challenges of our time, we can rapidly accelerate the progress of humanity and exponentially better the trajectory of society’s future at the global scale.

It is suggested in this paper that Mastery Learning Units can be successful in encouraging the talented students to excel in their interests and capabilities. The intent of this paper is to show how enrichment activities and centers can be easily implemented in the biology curriculum by the use of Mastery Learning Units. In so doing, only one mastery unit is included for the purpose of demonstration. It is suggested that teachers write the units that they will be using for their students. This would allow their units to fit their own particular objectives, as well as the needs and interests of their students.

The education of all students is important in the school system, however, all students learn differently and are at different levels. One strategy that is used to cope with this issue is differentiated instruction. Di fferentiated instruction is when you teach to the individual student's needs by pre-assessing and determining those needs. If the student already know the information you need to move onto something more challenging for them. Often these gifted students already know the information, since they do come into each grade knowing 50% of the curricula, but quite often they are taught it again.

The purpose of this interpretive biography was to understand how college graduates perceive their experiences in secondary (high school) accelerated learning programs and the impact of that participation on their continued education. This inquiry was guided by the overarching question: What are college graduates’ perceptions and understandings of their experiences in secondary accelerated programs? Using a postmodern philosophy to review the empirical materials, this interpretive biography focused on the lived experience of a college graduate who participated in an accelerated secondary program and focuses on her reflections after graduating from a four-year university. The study finds that generally, secondary accelerated learning programs like concurrent enrollment are considered valuable for their academic preparation, but may be reinforcing societal notions that students should go through their schooling more quickly than is beneficial.

This licentiate thesis deals with some influencing factors to develop mathematicalabilities among mathematical gifted adolescents. Krutetskii’s structureof the mathematical abilities and Mönks’ triadic model of giftedness isused as a theoretical framework.The thesis consists of two articles with different aims. The first aim is toinvestigate to what extent the students had participated in various mathematicalactivities during their years in school and what impact the students attachto these activities. The second aim was to examine some aspects of the importanceof motivation for the mathematically gifted adolescents.To answer the research questions data was collected with a questionnaireand an interview study of a total of 27 finalists in a national mathematicalcompetition for students in Swedish upper secondary schools.Generally the students were positive about the activities they had participatedin. Specifically acceleration in the subject and mathematical competitionsstand out as particularly significant activities according to the students.The study shows the significance of mathematical activities providing aframework to relate to, which will make the progression more visible for thestudents. Such activities could be mathematical competition problem solvingor acceleration in the subject.The results of the study indicates that intrinsic motivation together withextrinsic motivation with integrated or identified regulation are the most importanttypes of motivation. All students in the study had both intrinsic motivationand some type of extrinsic motivation. / Denna licentiatuppsats handlar om påverkansfaktorer som bidrar till att utvecklamatematiska förmågor hos matematiskt begåvade ungdomar. Somövergripande teoretiskt ramverk för studien används Krutetskiis struktur av dematematiska förmågorna samt Mönks begåvningsmodell.Uppsatsen består av två artiklar med olika syften. Den första artikeln syftartill att undersöka i vilken utsträckning studiens ungdomar har deltagit i olikamatematiska aktiviteter under sina år i skolan och vilken betydelse de tillmäterdessa aktiviteter. Den andra artikelns syfte är att undersöka några aspekter avmotivationens betydelse hos de matematiskt begåvade ungdomarna.För att besvara frågeställningarna samlades data in med en enkät- och intervjustudiemed totalt 27 finalister i Skolornas matematiktävling.Generellt uttalade sig eleverna positivt om de verksamheter som de hadedeltagit i under skoltiden. Speciellt framkom acceleration i ämnet och matematiktävlingarsom särskilt betydelsefulla. Studien indikerar betydelsen av attde matematiska verksamheterna ger en ram att relatera till, vilket gör utvecklingenmer synlig för eleverna. Sådana aktiviteter kan vara problemlösninginom tävlingsmatematik eller acceleration i ämnet.Resultaten av den andra studien visar att inre motivation tillsammans medyttre motivation med integrerad eller identifierad kontroll är de viktigaste formernaav motivation hos studiens deltagare. I studien framkommer också attingen av deltagarna endast hade inre motivation för ämnet. Tvärtom hadesamtliga deltagare både inre motivation och autonom yttre motivation.