Al-Lawati, A. Fatma, AL_Hamdan S. Najat. “ The
Attitude of Omani Administrators Towards Gifted Education.” A research Paper,
December,2007-12-10
Abstract
Many studies of attitude towards gifted
education were done to explore factors that influence educators' perceptions of
gifted education and gifted children. Being and Gagne (1994) studied around 50
variables, and only a few variables were found to be potentially valid
predictor of their attitude toward giftedness. Results from several studies (Almangoor,2000;
Kriss & Mary 1999; Jones & Southern 1992) showed that those with more
information and knowledge about gifted children had more positive attitude
towards gifted children and gifted
education in general. In this paper, our
aim was to further investigate attitudes towards gifted education in the
Sultanate of Oman, where there is a lot of interest in educational reform, and
where there are no official special programs for the gifted, to see if we can
find variables related to this culture.
The purpose of this
survey study was to investigate the attitudes of Omani administrators towards
gifted education with respect to their background and to various attitude
variables like sex, major of study, and training. The Primary hypothesis in the
study stated that there is a statistical significant difference in Omani
administrators’ attitudes towards gifted education according to different
variables related to their backgrounds. Ninety four Omani administrators from
different parts of the Sultanate of Oman were selected to participate in the
study. All the administrators filled "The Attitudes Towards the
Gifted" questionnaire. The t-test for independent variables, and the
one-way Anova were used to examine the differences between the variables. When
differences were found, the Bonferroni test was used to examine the direction
of the differences.
Omani administrators in
this study, tended to have similar attitudes towards gifted education. There
was a statistically significant difference according to their major of study. Those administrators with a diploma in
Education tended to have more positive attitudes towards gifted education than
those administrators with no diploma in education. No statistically significant
differences were found in the attitudes of Omani administrators towards gifted
education with respect to their sex, years of experience, training, and their
home town.
Implications of the
findings for the gifted children education were discussed in terms of the need
to evaluate teachers’ and administrators’ training related to gifted education
in general. Also, the study impresses the need for proponents of gifted
programs to address misconceptions that appear to be related to school reform
and appropriate programs for gifted children.
