Meeting the needs and potentials of high-ability, high-performing, and gifted students via differentiation

Maria Nicholas

Students reading with teacher by Ilmicrofono Oggiono, Flikr, CC BY 2.0

NAPLAN, PIRLS, TIMSS and PISA results, among other standardised outcomes, have shown that over many years, here in Australia and abroad, a large portion of school-aged children are ‘underachieving.’ That is, they are producing outcomes that fall below the expected minimum standard for same-aged peers, in mathematics, reading and science. At the same time, research has shown us that many of these students have high potential, raising the question of what can be done to improve student outcomes in the classroom.

Research into gifted education has estimated that up to 40-50% of high potential students are underachieving throughout their schooling. This is due to a range of reasons such as a student’s confidence at school or their motivation, attitudes towards school that may negatively impact their learning or not being identified as being gifted or of high potential, due to ‘masking’ (when a twice- or multi-exceptional child’s disability ‘masks’ their high ability) and/or the way in which giftedness is recognised or measured.

New research

Earlier this year my colleagues Andrew Skourdoumbis, Ondine Bradbury and I published the results of a scoping review in Gifted Child Quarterly and a piece in The Conversation. We reviewed findings from 38 studies (2000–2022) that (1) explored the approaches to differentiation that have been effectively used with high-ability students and (2) the school-level supports that enabled their application.

Via this review we identified 15 ways teachers have differentiated their teaching for the benefit of their high ability learners:

• Challenge and higher-order thinking – allowing students to explore a topic with greater depth and/or breadth, including the use of questioning techniques that invite high-order thinking;
• Open-ended, problem-based inquiry – allowing for different solutions and different paths of inquiry, including learning/applying the focus content via “real-world problems”;
• Resourcing that goes “beyond” – providing students with additional or specialised resources (e.g., a range of (or more complex) texts, computer programs, access to community-based resources);
• Allowing for choice – allowing for some degree of student choice regarding what, with whom, and/or how a topic is investigated and/or how learning is shared, including allowing students to progress at their own pace by moving through tasks quickly or taking time to “dig in”;
• Homogeneous collaboration – purposefully grouping like-ability or like-minded peers so they may work together to complete a task;
• Multiple pathways – providing students with multiple ways of accessing and producing learning content, including the multi-modal and multi-sensory;
• Mixed-ability collaboration and peer teaching or heterogeneous groupings – inviting students to work on the same task with friends or peers of varying skill sets;
• Acceleration – allowing students to progress through the school curriculum at a more rapid pace or at a younger age than their typically developing peers;
• Dialogue with the teacher – whether one-on-one or in groups;
• Compacting – where a teacher eliminates content from a student’s program or allows a student to “skip” a task they had already mastered;
• Supporting self-management – challenging and enabling students to manage their own learning processes responsibly to ensure they hold high expectations of themselves while also recognising their limitations;
• Inviting creativity – to foster imaginative expression and innovative thinking;
• Inter-disciplinary or cross-curricular foci – exploring topics from different perspectives and across discipline areas;
• Role models and mentors – providing opportunities to work and interact with experts, mentors or guest speakers.

The full report includes this handy infographic of the 15 approaches that can be used by/with teachers when planning or evaluating their teaching:

Infographic outlining approaches (Nicholas, Skourdoumbis & Bradbury, 2024)

The above has been used by  teachers and school leaders who have attended our workshops on High Ability Teaching and Learning provided in partnership with the Department of Education and the Centre for Higher Education Studies (CHES), from 2023-2024. Teachers and school leaders have been using the scoping review as a catalyst in a range of different ways:

• To explore the approaches teachers currently use, and those they would like to start using;
• To explore the approaches students currently experience, prefer and/or would like to start experiencing;
• to support a self-audit of the approaches a teacher is currently using/not using that can be used to explore the ‘what and why’ of current practice (mostly by school leaders to explore possible challenges to implementing some of the approaches, and/or what school leadership could do to support their teachers).

Dr Maria Nicholas is a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University, with an interest in students’ learning and education in pre-school, primary and secondary school settings, including high-ability and gifted teaching and learning, most especially as it relates to children’s/students’ literacy development (specialising in the learning and teaching of reading). Maria‘s interests also include digital literacies, teaching approaches, and the role of mediation in child/student development and learning.