engleski

Beliefs about the High Abilities of Twice- Exceptional Students with Dyslexia

Pre-service teacher education significantly contributes to the formation of student’s beliefs about the characteristics of children with special educational needs, including twice-exceptional students with dyslexia. The specific beliefs that students with dyslexia can have high abilities in some cognitive domains, and that they can also be gifted, is an important predictor of future teachers’ ability to recognise such children and to build on their strengths, rather than focus only on supporting them in domains that are challenging for them. In the initial phase of the Beliefs about High Abilities of Twice-Exceptional Children Scales construction, we piloted the first version of the scale which focused on beliefs about students with dyslexia. The convenience sample comprised 159 students (97.5% female, Age: M=20.67) from the teacher education study programmes at the University of Rijeka, Faculty of Teacher Education, who participated in this pilot study. The students provided the necessary socio-demographic information and answers on a 15-item scale intended to measure their beliefs about the high abilities of twice-exceptional children with dyslexia. The preliminary results indicated that the scale had satisfactory psychometric characteristics. The exploratory component analysis provided the evidence for a single-construct measure with a tentative possibility for the differentiation between the set of items related to innovative, creative and artistic thinking, and the set of items related with visual learning and processing abilities. Discriminant validity of these two sets needs to be further evaluated. The single- construct scale demonstrated high reliability. Students from higher years of the study programme had significantly higher scores when compared with the students from first two years of study, indicating that positive beliefs about the high abilities of twice-exceptional students with dyslexia became more prominent after completing the compulsory course on inclusive education. To conclude, it should be pointed out that the contribution of this research is twofold, both in the scientific validation of the investigated construct, which is mostly theoretically described, and in illuminating the potential of twice-exceptional students.

Dyslexia ; Twice - exceptional Children ; High Abilities ; Teacher Students ; Beliefs

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