High Ability Students’ family drawings and their parents’ needs: Α case study

Paper

Through the last seven years, some parents in Greece, who failed to find the adequate understanding for the specific needs of their children with high abilities at school, were looking for guidance in another “school environment” such as the Laboratory for the Development of Creativity, at the Department of Psychology, of the NKUA. The purpose of this study is to present characteristics of children with high abilities and their parents’ effort to find a way to support them. The sample consists of 42 families, in which children with high abilities presented a core set of advanced cognitive and learning characteristics, b specific difficulties at school, as well as in social or emotional domains. This presentation focuses on the descriptive results of the 42 families’ characteristics, mapping also the characteristics of these children through their parents' requests. Additionally, specific qualitative data were collected from the children themselves, via their family drawings. Two drawings are analyzed in details as a case study. A main result is that gifted children's parents are primarily worried about finding age-appropriate activities to address their gifted children's emotional needs and their desire for acquiring a “huge” number of knowledge in one or more domains. The design and the implementation of interventions to promote the creative/gifted/talented children’s and adolescents’ learning, school adaptation, relationships with peers and their potential development within family, school and community are discussed as necessary demands for the Greek state educational system.