No abstract

A three-year program, "The Enrichment Program for Cultivating Multiple Talents and Problem Solving Abilities for Gifted Preschoolers", was put into effect at National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan. Participants were 61 children ages 4 to 6 who were gifted or gifted with disabilities. In this study, we report the children's changes in problem solving abilities in two different types of classes within the program: one in which all children participated together in activities involving problem solving in multiple intelligences (DISCOVER/MD and another (Talent Development) in which small groups of1 to 8 children with similar interests and multiple intelligence strengths participated in activities designed especially for them. The scores of teacher assessments showed that most students performed well on closed as well as open problem solving types (Maker & Schiever, 2009), especially on Type 1 (closed), Type 4, and Type 5 (open) in both types of programs, but that they generally performed better on the Type 4 problems than Type 5, and better on both open-ended types when they were in the talent development courses than when they were in the MI courses. Authors concluded that young children whose talents are just developing may perform better on problems with slight limitations (Type 4) because they have had little experience structuring problems, which is necessary in solving Type 5 problems.

Metaphor offers a lens through which language teachers present their thinking about teaching and learning English as a second/foreign language. This study examined the changes of 25 middle school Chinese EFL teachers' belief in listening teaching through the use of metaphor analysis. Multiple sources of data were collected, including elicited metaphors, questionnaires, reflection journals and workshop observations. Fifteen metaphors before and 21 after the workshop were identified. By comparing these conceptual metaphors before and after the workshop, this study found that the teachers' negative attitude toward listening teaching was vanished and their view of listening teaching was broadened in terms of enhancing teacher-students ties and raising awareness of teaching design with holistic-multi-dimension understanding.