Differentiating Instruction for High-Achieving/Gifted Children in Regular Classrooms: A Field Test of Three Gifted-Education Models

The movement toward inclusive schools in this country has necessitated a search for instructional models that would best meet the needs of gifted and high-achieving children in increasingly heterogeneous classrooms. In the present study, a multiple baseline design was used to evaluate three popular models of gifted education implemented by general-education teachers in their classrooms. The study focused on process-oriented dependent variables such as the cognitive level of teacher queries and student responses during classroom interactions. While none of the models showed dramatic changes in cognitive complexity of teacher-student interaction, the Cognitive-Affective Interaction Model (Williams, 1986) demonstrated the best results for increasing the cognitive complexity of classroom interactions and on-task behavior of high-achieving students. A strong relationship was found between the cognitive level of teacher queries and student responses across all models.