The learners' attitude toward their acceleration class at SMAN 5 Surabaya

Acceleration program has become one of the major issues in gifted education recently. Some educators think that it is a form of opportunity discrimination. The program allows the participants to finish their study a year earlier. It also offers other programs that could facilitate the students to explore their abilities more and, at the same time, optimize it. The participants’ candidates of the acceleration program must be able to fulfill the requirement, which are having above average ability, creativity, and task commitment. In order to ensure the acceleration program is effective, the school decision makers need to maintain the accelerated learners’ positive attitude toward the program itself since their attitude have direct effect on their performance in learning because their attitude toward the program is the predisposition of them to act, think, and feel in a positive/negative way toward the program itself. The method used in this study is descriptive qualitative. The instruments used are pilot group, a Likert scale questionnaire, and Focus Group Discussions. To discover the result of the questionnaire, the writer edited, scored, coded, and tabulated the responses of the subjects. The study discovered that the accelerated learners of SMAN 5 Surabaya, in general, held positive attitude toward the acceleration program. They were fond of their new class since they found it was more enjoyable, interesting, and motivating compared to the regular class. The curriculum of the acceleration program was designed to last a year faster and the students found it was gladden since it allowed them to avoid material re-explaining. The teaching and learning activities ran trouble free. Further, the acceleration program gave chance to the students to explore their ability and optimize it. However, the students found that learning method used is monotonous since most teachers often made use of lecturing method. They also perceived that their teachers did not make the opportunity to the students to be actively involved during teaching and learning activities. The accelerated learners had experienced an attitude change in a positive way. They were more responsible and focus in what they had done. In this class, they also learnt to be more open to others. Their desire to learn more was very high due to their high level of curiosity as their nature. Most of the students came to class on time and always tried to attend all of the teaching and learning activities because they wanted to keep up with the program. At the end of this thesis, the writer made a brief summary from the previous chapters. She also delivered suggestions in order to improve the quality of the acceleration class at SMAN 5 Surabaya. She also provided recommendations for other researchers who conduct studies on the acceleration program as well as the aspects that were not covered in this study such as the administration, the curriculum, and the opinion and satisfaction level of both the students and the teachers