International Teachers’ Judgment of Gifted Mathematics Student Characteristics

Teachers play a key role in the identification and training of talented mathematicians, and their attitudes are important in improving math instruction for gifted students. We surveyed secondary mathematics teachers from South Korea, Turkey, and the United States. These teachers completed a survey instrument called the Teachers’ Judgments of Gifted Mathematics Student Characteristics (TJGMSC) that measured how important they believed 40 behaviors were with regards to students’ mathematics giftedness. They also evaluated different strategies for teaching mathematics. The more years teachers taught mathematics, the more likely they were to report that students’ computational skills, students’ ability to relate mathematics to everyday life, and students’ ability to generate multiple and unique solutions to problems were indicators of mathematical talent. The opposite was true for the highest level of mathematics taught. The higher the grade level of mathematics teachers taught, the less they valued each of these. Teachers with advanced degrees were less impressed with computation skills. Teachers from South Korea, whose students score near the top on international mathematics exams, were less likely to view mathematical talent as innate. They saw mathematics as an abstract subject in which students who were having difficulty should be given time in class to practice by themselves. They were less likely to regard mathematics as a practical topic or a formal way of representing the world. They were also less likely to use a variety of representations (pictures, concrete objects, and symbols) when teaching mathematics.