The factors influencing leadership skills of gifted and regular students and its implications for gifted education

This study attempts to identify certain factors that influence middle school students' leadership skills and thus attain implications for leadership education to improve those skills especially for gifted students. Through the probability cluster sampling method, 2,343 middle school students were selected to participate in the study with their parents. Several multiple regression analyses reveal significant effects of affective factor, cognitive factor, educational factor, and family factor on the students' leadership skills in the respective order of importance. These four factors accounted for 77% of the variance of the leadership skills, and the leadership skills were more closely related to affective factor such as creative personality and happiness than cognitive factor. A series of following hierarchical regression analyses specifically identified the variables and their subordinate components of the cognitive and affective factors with their own unique contributions still significant after the common contributions were deleted. Fifteen significant components were found including self­assurance and peer relations. The comparison of the results of the separate analyses for the gifted and regular students reveal that the affective and cognitive components related to the leadership skills were very different between these groups. These findings suggest that educators should pay more attention to the affective factor in nurturing leadership skills of the gifted students, and instruc- tional strategies should be differentiated to the gifted students in alignment with the empirical findings from the study.