There is much current interest in the field of education concerning the academically gifted student’s needs. Guilford’s Structure of Intellect model (Guilford, 1956) holds particular promise for positively influencing the development of cognitive skills among academically gifted students. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of using a program of instruction based upon Guilford’s Structure of Intellect (SI) model (Meeker, 1969) with children identified as academically gifted. Subjects consisted of 68 fourth-grade students who resided in two counties of northwestern Kentucky and who were identified as being academically gifted. The treatment group consisted of 34 academically gifted fourth-grade students attending various schools in one of the counties. Each student in the treatment group received three hours of instruction per week based on the SI model. This SI instruction was on a resource basis, outside their regular classroom instruction, and lasted for a total of 34 weeks. The control group consisted of 34 academically gifted fourth-grade students who attended school within a second county in northwestern Kentucky. The control group received no instruction based upon the SI model; rather, they received only traditional instruction in a regular classroom. The dependent variables were the abilities of evaluation, memory, cognition, divergent production, and convergent production as defined by Guilford and as measured by the five subscales of the Structure of Intellect / Learning Abilities (SOI/LA) test (Meeker, 1969) which possess independent items across the subtests. A pretest-posttest control group design was used. Five analyses of covariance were computed, one for each of the five dependent variable measures. Results of the analyses indicated significant differences between the SOI / LA scores of the treatment group over the control group at the time of posttesting for all of the dependent variable measures except memory. Results of this study demonstrated that a program of instruction, based upon Guilford’s SI model, positively influenced the development of cognitive skills, as measured by the SOI / LA test, among students in the treatment group.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:WKU/oai:digitalcommons.wku.edu:theses-2813 |
| Date | 01 May 1984 |
| Creators | Parr, Judith |
| Publisher | TopSCHOLAR® |
| Source Sets | Western Kentucky University Theses |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Masters Theses & Specialist Projects |
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