This study attempted to understand the experiences of raising gifted young children in detail and find the direction of gifted young child education in Korea, through narrative inquiry method. The research questions are as follows:
1. What do the tal...
This study attempted to understand the experiences of raising gifted young children in detail and find the direction of gifted young child education in Korea, through narrative inquiry method. The research questions are as follows:
1. What do the talented characteristics of children mean for their mothers?
2. What is the role of mothers for discovering the talented characteristics of their children?
3. What are the difficulties in raising gifted young children?
The narrative inquiry method of Connelly and Clandinin(1995) is applied to this study to understand what mothers see the talented characteristics of their children, what difficulties they go through in raising, and their needs, through their truly voices.
The targets, studied in this study, are 7 mothers who have 5-year-old gifted young children in H institution in Busan. H institution educates gifted young children, selected from Wechsler Scales within the range of top 5%. We interviewed in-person for 8 weeks from Jun. 2010 to Jul. 2010, according as their schedules. 7 participants of study took part in in-person-interview 3 times, and the duration of interview was 60~90 minutes per each laps. When interview was started, we had a conversation of the experiences about raising gifted young children, wrote down the contents and recorded with their consent. The data of the contents of interview forms about 150 A4 sheets.
The results of this study are as follows.
1. Mothers of gifted young children think the important talented characteristics which their children have are the ability to solve problems creatively and patience. Also, they said that leadership is necessary and important for their children to achieve self-realization and demonstrate more powers within groups, so that they can live together.
2. Mothers of gifted young children try to have self-regulating and receptive raising-attitude and offer various experiences in physically and socially. And they do their best to control themselves not to come expectations before achievement of their children, even though the high ability to achieve tends to enhance expectations of mothers.
3. Mothers of gifted young children have difficulties, because of the characteristics of their children and family, and social eyes. There are comments for the necessity of systematic and continuous gifted young children education programs, because of the confusion from the absence of systematic program and national supports, burden of private education fee, conflict existing education program for made-gifted children, and the anxiety to future.