The Journal of the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children

The World Council for Gifted and Talented Children
This article reports on data collected during the period between 2008 and 2010, where 332
(69% ) of the 481 students completing the unit provided their responses to the pre and post surveys,
with many providing written reflections on how and why they felt their opinions towards giftedness
and gifted education had changed. Pseudonyms have been used throughout for all reflective
commentary.
Survey instrument
The survey instrument utilized was an Opinionnaire developed by Gagné and Nadeau (1985)
entitled “Opinions about the Gifted and their Education”. A Likert scale was utilised to categorise
responses to each statement, with 1 indicating total disagreement and 5 indicating total agreement.
The Opinionnaire included 34 items (half of which are negatively oriented) and aims to gain insight
into opinions concerning the gifted and their education in six areas:
1. Needs and support - needs of gifted children and support for special services (8 items);
2. Resistance to objections - objections based on ideology and priorities (10 items, all
negatively framed);
3. Social value - social usefulness of gifted persons in society (4 items, 1 of which was negatively
framed);
4. Rejection - isolation of gifted persons by others in the immediate environment (3 items);
5. Ability grouping - attitudes toward special homogeneous groups, classes, schools (4 items, 3
of which were negatively framed); and
6. School acceleration - Attitudes toward accelerative enrichment (5 items, 3 of which were
negatively framed).
Analysis
Results were analyzed using a combination of software packages, SPSS for the survey data
and NVivo for the qualitative reflections. Descriptive and nonparametric statistics formed the basis of
the quantitative data analysis, while qualitative data in the form of written student reflections was
analysed for themes and commentary specific to the 6 categories identified by Gagné and Nadeau
(1985).
Initial statistical analysis on the six subscales originally identified by Gagné and Nadeau
(1985) indicated insufficient internal reliability to utilise these subscales statistically (Nunnaly, 1978)
but they were felt to be useful for categorizing the sets of items which were individually analysed. As
responses to single Likert items are normally treated as ordinal data, it was felt that the most
appropriate test to use was the nonparametric version of the repeated measures t-test, the Wilcoxin
signed rank test. Nanna and Sawilowsky (1998) also support the use of nonparametric tests such as
the Wilcoxin with typical Likert scale data, suggesting a considerable power advantage over the
equivalent parametric t test, with the advantage increasing with sample size.
For the purposes of displaying the Likert scale mean responses in the form of figures, actual
rather than inverted scores were used, however for the statistical analysis, the scores were inverted.
The underlying assumption utilised for the purposes of the display of actual rather than inverted
mean scores was to present a visual representation of the level of agreement or disagreement, with
a score of 4 and above representative of a strong level of agreement, scores around 3 representing
indecision and scores of 2 and below representing disagreement. For each of the 34 items, a
Wilcoxin signed rank test was conducted to determine the significance of the difference between the
responses at the beginning and end of the semester. In addition to measures of statistical
significance, effect sizes, which measure the strength of the relationship between two variables,
were determined using a calculation of r as recommended by Clark-Carter (2004) whereby z is
converted into r with:
r =
Where z is available from the SPSS statistics table output and N equals the total sample size
for both sets of responses corrected for ties (responses that are the same pre and post). Cohen
(1988) suggested that r = .1 could be considered small, r = .3 could be considered medium and r =
.5 could be considered large in terms of effect sizes. According to Ellis (2010), the reporting of effect
34 Gifted and Talented International – 26(1), August, 2011; and 26(2), December, 2011.