Teaching higher order thinking skills to gifted students: A meta-analysis

Abstract

The current study examined the effects of higher order thinking skills (HOTS) interventions with gifted students in Taiwan. A total of 25 studies published between 1997 and 2017 were included. Twenty-nine effect sizes were extracted for the 25 studies. The small number of existing studies indicates a lack of scholarly attention to HOTS in gifted education in Taiwan in the past two decades. On the other hand, the effect sizes, ranged from 0.26 to 2.01, with a mean of 0.78 and standard deviation of 0.39, showed moderately large effect sizes for these interventions, which can be interpreted as evidence for general effectiveness. Subgroup analyses indicated that intervention effects did not vary significantly by grade level, type of program, intervention dosage, and type of dissemination. However, a statistically significant difference was found between the effect sizes in different types of instructional design (i.e. stand-alone HOTS unit vs. integrated HOTS unit). Implications are discussed.