Intellectual Domain
The intellectual domain of potential is one of four broad categories of natural abilities that apply to all students, including high potential and gifted (HPG) students.
It is the responsibility of a school to create the conditions that support intellectually gifted students to make ongoing progress and achieve learning goals. An intellectually gifted student is one who demonstrates outstanding performance or the potential for outstanding academic performance, when compared with other students of the same age, experience and opportunity.
Indicators of intellectual giftedness include students who:
- enjoy learning and academic challenges
- demonstrate persistence and high motivation when facing academic challenges
- do well in classroom activities and assignments
- comprehend complex ideas quickly
- learn in greater depth than their age peers
A school must support intellectually gifted students by:
- providing professional learning for teachers: Professional learning is designed to meet the needs of teachers working with intellectually gifted students. It supports teachers to develop their confidence and expertise to recognise and engage intellectually gifted students. This includes developing teaching practices that incorporate sophisticated content, concepts and skills, and enable students to think critically and creatively, manipulate information, construct new knowledge, and communicate their understanding in increasingly complex ways.
- assessing student’s ability: Teachers use assessment as the starting point for planning challenging learning that will extend all learners. For intellectually gifted students teachers design and use assessments that provide evidence of students’ advanced thinking and problem-solving skills. For example, assessments might ask students to find solutions, analyse and synthesise ideas with greater complexity and give detailed explanations. Information from assessments is then used to modify instruction for individuals or groups of learners.
- differentiating the curriculum: curriculum differentiation occurs where teachers adapt the syllabus to meet the specific learning needs of a group of students. For intellectually gifted students, this requires access to advanced, intellectually challenging, and/or faster paced academic material that builds on and extends the regular curriculum. For example, students need to be challenged by questions that require a higher level of response or by open-ended questions that stimulate inquiry, active exploration, and discovery.
Engaging, challenging and extending all students according to their ability, interests and circumstances lies at the heart of an effective school. For intellectually gifted students this means provisioning a curriculum built around higher-level skills and concepts and creating opportunities for in-depth exploration of more elaborate and complex ideas, problems and themes. It also means making sure that schools and teachers are equipped to extend and challenge intellectually gifted students so that they make ongoing progress and achieve learning goals.