The study of overexcitibilities predicting learning performance, creativity, and psychological adjustment on gifted and regular students

[[abstract]]Abstract The main purpose of the research was to develop OE patterns predicting learning performance, creativity, and psychological adjustment. The study contains two parts. In part I, ‘The Me Scale’ was remodeled as ‘The Me Scale II’. There were 2211 gifted and regular graders included as subjects. Their performance on ‘The Me Scale II’ was analyzed by gender, category of giftedness, and grade. Part II was to develop OE patterns which were expected to predict learning performance, creativity, and psychological adjustment. There were 1214 8th gifted and regular graders included. As the patterns being developed, they were transformed into structural equation models which could confirm the fitness between hypothesized models and sample data. The following multi-group invariance was also tested. Main conclusions are stated as follows: Male students reported different OE patterns from their female counterparts. Gifted and talented students reported stronger OEs than regular students. Among gifted and talented students, mathematically talented students reported the most significant OEs than musically and art talented students did. 6th graders reported the least significant OEs than 4th and 8th graders, while 8th graders reported the most significant OEs among the three groups. The study found that “intellectual” and “perfectionistic” OEs were the most positively predictive OEs on learning performance and that ‘creative’ and ‘imaginative’ OEs were the most positively predictive OEs on creativity. It was also found that ‘intellectual’ and ‘empathetic’ OEs were the most positively predictive OEs on psychological adjustment while ‘physical’ and ‘emotional’ OEs were the most negatively predictive ones. The nine structural equation models constructed in this study fitted well between hypothesized models and sample data, indicating that the nine models could explain the sample data well. Multi-group invariance test also showed that the nine structural equation models could well imply to different gender and groups of gifted and general students, meaning that any single model developed could be inferred to different group of subjects.