A computer game from The Institute for Research on Children, Youth and Family helps to detect gifted children
The Institute of Child, Youth and Family Research (IVDMR) at the Faculty of Social Sciences has been dealing with the psychology of gifted children for a long time. One of the main stumbling blocks in the work and education of gifted children is detecting their gifts early on. And it is in this field that the Institute has enjoyed great success. In the second half of October, it held a successful conference on working with gifted children for teachers and psychologists in primary schools and received an excellent project evaluation. You can read more in the article below.
The Invenio screening test, prepared by a research team from the IVDMR, will help detect gifted children in the initial grades of primary schools. The project, whose principal investigator is associate professor Šárka Portešová, has received an excellent evaluation by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TAČR). "The project and especially its outputs, if they are used more widely, have the potential to significantly strengthen the early identification of gifted individuals and the subsequent development of their intellectual abilities and talent, which will undoubtedly ultimately contribute to the development of our society as a whole," the TAČR evaluation states.
The research team has also created a computer-based interactive game full of logic and mathematical tasks that will reveal gifted children who are already ahead of their peers in maths in the first grade. Fourteen hundred children in twelve schools across the Czech Republic have tried out the game as part of the project. Gifted children are often "lost" in the Czech school system, the vast majority of them are not noticed or given special care. "Hundreds of gifted first-graders come to school, but the schools do not know how to work with them and do not have a comprehensive set of materials for them. As a result, children who are looking forward to school become bored and gradually some of them resign themselves to the educational system as it is," Portešová told EDUzín magazine, which focuses on educational issues.
This project, funded by the Operational Programme Research, Development and Education – through the Innovations in Pedagogy call, was created in cooperation between four university departments. People from the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Art Education at the Faculty of Education created the videos and worksheets, while colleagues from the Department of Psychology at the Faculty of Social Sciences created the screening test. Experts from the Department of Computer Science are also involved, helping to safeguard large-scale data.
You can read an interview with Šárka Portešová on the topic of gifted children in Reporter magazine [in Czech only].
