Analyzing families' hopes and expectations for gifted education programs.

Parents can and do invest a considerable amount of time, energy, and resources into selecting the best program options for their gifted children. This is true for both in-school and informal opportunities. While the research literature offers a glimpse into their perceptions of gifted programming, there is little examination of what parents are hoping for when they select programs in the first place. In this two-paper dissertation, I examined what parents expected to obtain for their children and their families as a result of gifted education program selection. One paper was a scoping review of the literature on parents of the gifted, conducted as an extension of the last critique on the literature published in 2012. This paper was titled Parents of the Gifted: A Scoping Review of the Literature. In the second paper, I examined the expectations of parents who enrolled, or were seeking to enroll their children in a university-based gifted program. This paper was titled Great Expectations: The Parental Pursuit of Optimal Gifted Programming and was a qualitative study utilizing focus groups. Together, these two papers illuminated some aspects of the Evolving Complexity Theory (ECT) model of talent development; namely the environmental press and socio-cultural mediation experienced by the gifted student as a result of family choices exercised in pursuit of their education. Additionally, I delineated an important connection between and throughout the two papers to elucidate the parental motivation for program selection. This research is of significance both to the research literature and to practitioners. For the research literature, it serves to illustrate some aspects of the newly developed ECT theory and considers what parents want prior to program selection. For practitioners, this may be used in practice to support the optimization of current programming.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Grantor

Baylor University.

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Sodergren, Celeste D. C., 1973-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kettler, Todd.

• Parents.
• Gifted.
• Gifted education.
• Expectations.
• University-based programs.

Statement dc:rights

• Baylor University works are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. Contact libraryquestions@baylor.edu for inquiries about permission.

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2104/13110

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:baylor-ir.tdl.org:2104/13110