Understanding giftedness through general and domain-specific aspects of intelligence

• Main Author: Song, Kwang-Han
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7588

This dissertation includes studies that tested an integrated model of human abilities. Two individual studies were done to understand the phenomenon of giftedness through common and domain-specific aspects of intelligence. The first study was a conceptual test investigating gifted students with learning disabilities (GLD) in terms of their profiles of abilities or disabilities. A model of intelligence was created to explain giftedness with and without learning disabilities. The second study was an empirical test of gifted and GLD students' feelings of direction toward learning and academic activities. The results suggest that gifted students are gifted in practical and idealistic content domains, and auditory and visual representation domains, whereas GLD students are gifted in the idealistic content and visual representation domains. Giftedness appears in domains that are determined by domain memory and can appear as disabilities in specific domains when the domain memory is weak. Gifted students are more "all-rounded" because their level of domain memory is high and balanced, whereas GLD students are gifted in idealistic and visual domains but disabled in practical, auditory, and language-related domains because practical and auditory domain memory levels are much lower than idealistic and visual domain memory levels (i.e., GLD between-domain differences). The findings suggest that individual differences in terms of abilities or disabilities may be best understood as both giftedness in domains (i.e.,ds) and high general intelligence (g). Discussion and new directions for further study were provided.