From personal constructs toward construction of tolls for identifying potential giftedness and creativity

Paper

The paper will present the results of a project whose goal was to respond to the missing needs of practitioners in their efforts to recognize and identify the potentials of gifted children as well as the potential for creativity at an early preschool age. As a theoretical and methodological framework, we used Kelly's theory of personal constructs in which knowledge is viewed as research and experience plays a significant role in its determination. Starting from the assumption that educators' recognition of gifted and creative potentials in children depends on their beliefs about giftedness and creativity, we used the constructivist technique of repertoire network and elicitation using the minimal context technique (Fransella and Bannister, 1977), modified to examine group construct in the group of professionals. In a pre-selected group of experienced preschool teachers, we researched their constructs about the main subject of the research. By analyzing the obtained grids in the Idiogrid program, two constructs were obtained. One about a potentially gifted child and one about a potentially creative child. The process of analysis of the main components determined their key dimensions, and based on the elements of key dimensions, we created instruments for assessing potential giftedness (NS-D 1.0 / 2019) and potential creativity (NS-K 1.0 / 2019). Three dimensions were obtained for the construct of potential giftedness: Social, Intellectual and Creative, while two dimensions were obtained for the construct of potential creativity: Social and Personal characteristics. Compared to contemporary views on the phenomena of giftedness and creativity, the obtained constructs have many common elements. The scales provide insight into a child’s strengths and potentials, as well as those less developed, that also remain visible to practitioners for incentive planning purposes. They also provide an opportunity for more educators or persons to assess the behavior of the same child and for the observed differences in assessments to be the subject of their further communication. Scales are created in such a way as to obtain a graphical profile of the expressed characteristics of a potentially gifted child on the dimensions of social behavior, cognitive abilities and preferences and creativity (for the giftedness scale) and for the potential creativity scale characteristics of a potentially creative child on the dimensions of social behavior and personal characteristics (the names of the constructs only approximately express the content of the items within the dimension).
It is expected that further research and validation of the scales will enable the positioning of an individual child in relation to the characteristic profile of his age (peer) group.
The paper is part of the project "Mapping the talent and creativity of preschool children", Preschool Teacher Training College, Novi Sad, realized thanks to the support of the Provincial Secretariat for Higher Education and Scientific Research as a developmental-research project of higher schools in 2019.