Metacognition in learning-disabled gifted students

In recent years, research with students identified as academically gifted has focused on what processes enable these students to perform at high levels of ability. The present study was carried out in the context of exploring the role of metacognition in giftedness. A specific focus of the study was whether learning-disabled gifted students performed more similarly to their gifted or nongifted peers (i.e., learning-disabled or average-achieving) on measures of metacognition. An interview was used to assess metacognitive knowledge in reading, and the error-detection paradigm was paired with the think-aloud method of data collection to investigate metacognitive skills in monitoring comprehension while reading a text. The dependent variables were an index of metacognitive knowledge, the percentage of metacognitive statements made, the number of errors detected, and a comprehension score. A measure of prior knowledge was used as a covariate.The subjects were 48 boys, drawn equally from both the elementary and high school grade levels, who had been identified by their respective school systems as being gifted, learning-disabled gifted, average-achieving, or learning-disabled. The design incorporated two levels of giftedness (gifted or not gifted) and two levels of learning disability (learning-disabled or not learning-disabled) at two grade levels (elementary and high school). Results of the multivariate analysis of covariance revealed a main effect for giftedness, indicating that the subjects identified as gifted performed significantly better than did the nongifted subjects. This result, coupled with the lack of gifted-by-learning disabilities interaction, showed that the learning-disabled gifted subjects performed more like their gifted than their nongifted peers on the four dependent variables. There was also a main effect for grade, with the subjects at the high school level performing better on the dependent variables than the subjects in the elementary grade level. Finally, a grade-by-gifted interaction was revealed, which an examination of the univariate analyses of variance indicated was most likely due to a ceiling effect on the measures of metacognitive knowledge and comprehension.These results support the hypotheses that giftedness is related to the use of metacognitive skills in a comprehension-monitoring task, and that the learning-disabled gifted subjects perform characteristically like their gifted peers with respect to their use of metacognitive knowledge and skills