Diagnosing resources for effective learning via teacher and parent checklists

AbstractChecklists are an economical form of diagnostic instruments and are therefore well suited to support decision making on individual fostering of students in every day school life. We developed a teacher and a parent checklist based on the theory of educational and learning capital (Ziegler & Baker, 2013), that is, assessing the students' resources for learning. A study with 5th to 8th graders demonstrated the checklists' diagnostic properties. Overall, the teacher ratings of students' capitals proved to be reliable, objective and highly valid while parent ratings turned out to be less valid. Implications and possibilities of practical usage are discussed.Keywords: educational capital, learning capital, giftedness, checklist, teacher, parentTraditionally gifted identification is person-centered and targets only single attributes of individuals as indicators of their giftedness. For example, in the famous Genetic Studies in Genius conducted by Lewis Terman at Stanford University, the sample of approximately 1,500 Californian students was identified by their extremely high IQ (Terman, 1925; Terman & Oden, 1947). Another important single attribute that is frequently used for gifted identification is high achievement. For example, in The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, the gifted are identified by scores of 700 or higher on a section of the SAT Reasoning Test (Benbow, 1992; Lubinski, 2000; Lubinski & Benbow, 1994). However, this single-variable approach does not offer reliable identification. Even those who became Noble Laureates were excluded from gifted samples earlier in their lives (Subotnik & Arnold, 1994). As a consequence, the idea that giftedness might correspond to just one personal attribute has been discarded. Numerous models have been proposed in which giftedness was viewed as the combination of several personal attributes such as cognitive abilities, task commitment, creativity, or wisdom (e.g., Renzulli, 2005; Sternberg, 2003). However, with the advent of contextual approaches in gifted education, this new multiple-attribute approach also received severe critique. Firstly, the improvement in identification was only marginal and secondly the neglect of environmental variables was increasingly considered a serious theoretical short-coming (Feldman, 1992; Tannenbaum, 1986). Thus, most recent models of giftedness emphasize the need to include internal as well as external moderators that transform gifts into extraordinary achievements (e.g., Gagne, 2009, 2013; Heller, Perleth, & Lim, 2005). However, contextual factors have almost never been implemented in gifted identification instruments. Most scholars, while conceding the importance of internal and external factors other than gifts or talents, still insisted that talents or gifts should be the sole core of identification (e.g., Gagne, 2013). Others would measure internal and external factors in the identification process (Heller & Perleth, 2010), but still insist that identification is solely based on gifts and talents in the traditional sense. However, this procedure renders the inclusion of the contextual factors in the theoretical model to lip service only. It leaves us with the conclusion that, despite the widely acknowledged importance of contextual factors in conceptions of giftedness, these factors have not yet been systematically considered in gifted identification. To the best of our knowledge, the only exceptions are two measurement instruments developed within the framework of the Actiotope Model of Giftedness (Ziegler, 2005): The Nuremberg Gifted Identification Checklist (NGIC; Harder, Trottler, & Ziegler, 2013; Ziegler, Harder, Mahn, & Trottler, 2013) and the Questionnaire of Educational and Learning Capital (QELC; Leana-Tascilar, 2015; Vladut, Liu, Leana-Tascilar, Vialle, & Ziegler, 2013; Vladut, Vialle, & Ziegler, 2015). In the definition offered by Ziegler, Vialle, and Wimmer (2013), "an actiotope includes an individual and the material, social and informational environment with which that individual actively interacts" (p. …