Thu 18.09.2014 - 13:45-14:15 - Foyer

Specific School Measures Designed for Gifted French Middle School Students: Presentation and Challenges  Poster

Presenter: Karine Cuer-Buard
Author(s): Karine Cuer-Buard, (GRHAPES, France), Amélie Courtinat-Camps, (GRHAPES, France), Minna Puustinen, (GRHAPES, France)

The concept of giftedness is recurrently debated in the educational context in France (Cellier, 2007), and it has become one of the concerns of the French Ministry of Education who shows the intention of organizing pedagogical measures adapted to gifted students (Tordjman, 2005). Gifted students (i.e., whose intelligence quotient is ≥ 130, cf. the criterion of the World Health Organization) represent, in France, 2.3% of 6-to-16-year-old children and adolescent, that is, 200 000 students. In order to address their special educational needs some secondary schools propose to these students to pursue their schooling in heterogeneous classrooms while benefiting from a specific measure (e.g., curriculum acceleration, tutoring, small groups outside school hours). The present communication constitutes the first step of a research whose aim is to analyze in more detail the case of public middle schools that have made that choice. In fact, there exists currently no evaluation of the effects of those specific measures from the viewpoint of the school and the teachers, the students, and their families. Our analysis will be based on Tremblay’s (2012) multidimensional model of quality evaluation which proposes to evaluate a given measure according to ten interrelated dimensions: pertinence, appropriateness, congruity, synergy, effectiveness, relevance, impact, well-foundedness, and flexibility. We formulate the hypothesis that such an evaluation will help the field actors to develop a systemic view of the functioning of the specific measures, to better understand their complexity and thereby improve their flexibility. Within this context, the aim of this communication will be to sum up the situation and clarify the problematic and the challenges produced by the schooling of gifted students in France. Specific measures implemented in some public middle schools will be presented.