| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 特殊教育研究所 === 90 === The content-analysis and meta-analysis of the researches in gifted education of Taiwan, R. O. C.
Chiung-Hui, Peng
abstract
The main purposes of this study are: (1) to investigate the outcomes of experimental variables of researches in gifted education from 1967 to 2001. The features of this analysis are included researchers’ background, related features, the traits of subjects, assessment materials, and the analysis methods of data; (2) to investigate the overall weighted mean- effect sizes of creativity, cognitive thinking abilities, the performance of achievement in creative thinking instruction with meta-analysis method, and to find out moderator variables that may influence the effects of creative thinking instruction.
After systematic searching for the literature from bibliography and electronic database, 441 researches were coded for content analysis, and the related data were calculated with frequency and percentage. Besides, 15 researches on creative thinking instruction were coded for meta-analysis, and the effect- sizes were calculated by Hedges and Olkin’s(1985) procedure. Furthermore, this study was tested all coded features by ‘Categorical Model’ to find out moderator variables. The followings are major results of this study:
1. In content analysis
A. Researchers’ background
a. One group of core researchers conducts studies frequently on gifted education.
b. The number of female researchers has been increasing during those years, and almost catches up with that of male researchers.
c. Most researches on the current gifted education are almost finished by only one author, except for the dissertations/ theses. The number of working-alone researcher nearly doubles than that of group-working ones.
d. Only few teachers engaged in research.
B. Related features
a. The quantity of journals that dominates the sources of empirical researches conducted by dissertations/theses has been increasing those years.
b. Few researches on gifted education are issued in the journals of special education.
c. Topics keep changing every year. Some popular topics are: “Emotion Characteristics and Social Adaptation”, “Cognitive Thinking Characteristics”, “Carrier and Tracking”, and “Policies and System of Gifted Education”.
d. Different sources focus on different topics.
e. Survey and correlational researches are the methods used by the researchers most frequently.
C. The traits of subjects
a. Sampling areas focus on cities, and decrease from north to south.
b. The majority of samples are general ability gifted, especially for high- grade students in the elementary schools.
c. The different topics are not in a normal distribution.
d. Lack of studies for pre-school gifted, handicapped gifted, culturally disadvantage gifted, and underachieving gifted students.
e. Purposeful- sampling is the major method of sampling.
D. Assessment materials
a. Many researchers are willing to collect data with paper-writing instead of related instructional methods. But, it’s good to see that the following researchers use one more methods afterwards.
b. The 70% return rate of questionnaire is pretty high satisfactory.
c. Standardized assessment instruments are not enough, and they only focus on some specific topics.
E. The analysis methods for data
a. Most data processing methods rely on quantitative analysis. And statistics methods are usually adopted by basic and intermediate skills.
b. Statistics methods adopted more frequently are: “descriptive statistics”, “t/z test”, “analysis of variance“.
c. Most research topics used “descriptive statistics” statistic methods frequently.
2. In meta-analysis
A. The overall weighted mean- effect size of creative thinking on instructional studies was between middle and small magnitude.
B. The Instruction for creative thinking promotes different creativities. The descending orders of the weighted mean- effect size of creativities were flexibility, originality, fluency, and elaboration.
C. Instruction for creative thinking promotes the performance of high-level cognitive thinking and achievements of gifted students.
D. The moderator variables of creative thinking studies were sources of teaching materials, and many kinds of assessment instrument.
Base on the results of study, the researchers also provided a discussion and made some recommendations to upgrade the reliability and efficiency of gifted education.
Keywords: empirical researches, content analysis, meta-analysis
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