IPGS 2013 - International workshop on Individual promotion of gifted students in the classroom through self-regulated learning

The mediation of self-regulated learning during regular classroom instruction has two advantages: First, it facilitates a promotion of gifted pupils within a normal classroom environment, from which non-gifted pupils can also profit. Second, it establishes an important precedent when a future goal is the acquisition of achievement excellence in a talent domain. Studies confirm (see Ericsson, 2002, Weisberg, 2003), that gifted pupils also need about 10 000 hours of deliberate practice before they attain achievement excellence in a talent domain. This extremely long process cannot be continually accompanied by parents, teachers or other agents of instruction. The acquisition of self-regulatory learning competences is therefore an important skill for talented learners who aspire to attain achievement excellence at some point of time.
It is important to mediate self-regulatory competences as early as possible (Weinert & Schrader, 1997) and to apply them in learning processes at school as well as at home. In the workshop we will present a training program for primary school children in which self-regulatory competences for various learning strategies and proficiencies (e.g. time management, homework behavior) are cultivated over several weeks (see Ziegler & Stoeger, 2005). One advantage of this training program is that it can be administered by teachers during normal classroom instruction, and can be practiced by the students over a long period of time in conjunction with their homework assignments. In addition to the fact that the training is highly realizable, a further advantage is that the students not only obtain declarative knowledge but also procedural and conditional knowledge (see Winne & Butler, 1994). That means the students do not merely acquire, as in several other trainings, factual knowledge about how learning is supposed to take place, but rather they also implement this knowledge over a period of several weeks. Furthermore, they are provided with an awareness of for which situations and with which sorts of learning material the chosen strategies are successful.
We also will talk about the results of several evaluation studies conducted in primary schools in Germany. The studies show that the training programs are effective in regular classrooms (Stoeger & Ziegler, 2008, 2011) and that pupils with different cognitive abilities profit similarly from a training in self-regulated learning (Stoeger & Ziegler, 2010). The training also was deemed to be suitable for interventions to reduce underachievement (2005).