De kracht van engagement uitgewikkeld

Although gifted students can demonstrate a strong task orientation, in educational practice it is often not self-evident for these students to become and remain engaged in learning at school. Both from a societal and an educational perspective, there are concerns about the loss of developmental potential among these students. This thesis focuses on the question of what gifted students need in order to become and remain engaged in learning at school. In order to do justice to the complexity of education and to the challenges faced by both students and their education-related significant others, a combination of quantitative and qualitative research was conducted. In doing so, we carefully listened to the voices of gifted students and their education-related significant others. The data was interpreted from both a psychological and a pedagogical perspective, with attention paid to what the results mean for classroom practice.The results show that for gifted students, an autonomy-supportive environment is essential to become engaged in learning. In order to remain engaged, even when encountering resistance, structure is crucial for both gifted and average-intelligence students. It remains a challenge to find a pedagogical balance between autonomy support and structure in educational practice that is suitable for each unique student. It is helpful to focus on the educational needs of the student, to listen sensitively to students, whereby reflection on one's own actions can be key to providing equitable, tailor-made educational support.

Dissertation: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/076347ee-d9d4-4eb3-9e25-fb4aba7c65d5