Serving gifted children in developmental and threshold countries — Turkey

The aim of this paper is to reveal the current situation of gifted education in Turkey. The talents that are valued and the concepts of giftedness were discussed according to the country’s cultural and political perspectives. Studies that had been made to analyze the beliefs of lay people, teachers and parents with respect to gifted students and their education were mentioned. Programs such as special schools (science high schools, private school programs), resource rooms and after-school programs (Science and Art Centers [SACs], Education Programs for Talented Students [EPTS], child universities) were introduced. How these programs currently function was also discussed. In addition, it has emerged that the studies carried out in the past 10 years focused on the adaptation of internationally popular intelligence scales, on the development of original intelligence-, talent- and domain-specific creativity identification tests, on the guidance needs of the students and their parents, on the development of differentiated programs in different areas. In conclusion, even though the amount of research and the awareness toward giftedness in Turkey is increasing there is still much to do. In addition, it is recommended that collaboration should be increased among different institutions to be able to serve gifted students effectively. © 2017 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.One of the most important studies made recently concerns the development of the first national intelligence scale called Anadolu-Sak Intelligence Scale (ASIS), which is based on the general intelligence theory, the Cattel–Horn–Carrol theory and the Planning, Attention-Arousal, Simultaneous and Successive Theory (PASS) (Sak, 2015). The Education Programs for Talented Students (EPTS) team developed this test within the scope of the project called Project IQ, which took a research grant from Anadolu University (Project IQ, 2016). The research team has already finished the pilot study by applying ASIS to 1,202 children ageg 4 to 12 years old. The researchers stated that the preliminary results were very good. The research team also selected norm regions for Turkey and trained testers to conduct the norm studies. They plan to complete the study in 2017. The Ministry of National Education has assigned a protocol to use the test as one of the principal intelligence tests for identifying gifted and talented children