Predictors of a General Attitude toward Gifted Education

Abstract

Among past studies attempting to identify factors which account for the large individual differences in attitude toward gifted education, none has succeeded in doing so with much precision. In their literature review, Bégin and Gagné (1995) attributed this lack of significant results in large part to various methodological problems. These methodological problems were directly addressed in the present study. A sample of 139 teachers and 138 parents completed an attitude scale and answered ten sociodemographic questions. The results of a first regression analysis underscored the importance of certain individual variables, such as education level and family income, as predictors of the attitude scores. In order to account for the non-independence between the ten variables involved, principal components were extracted and four factors identified. Factor scores were then introduced in a new regression analysis. Two of them, Socioeconomic Status and Contact with Giftedness, were found to explain 12% and 10% respectively of the variance in attitude scores, twice as much than in the most successful past study. It is recommended that this methodological approach be used in future studies to search for other significant predictors of people's attitudes toward the education of gifted and talented children.