Clarifying the Connections Among Giftedness, Metacognition, Self-Regulation, and Self-Regulated Learning: Implications for Theory and Practice

Abstract

The concept of giftedness has historically been shaped by theories of IQ, creativity, and expertise (including early conceptions of metacognition). These theories focus within the mind of the individual learner. Social, emotional, and motivational qualities of giftedness were treated as add-ons, not part of the core construct. This created misalignment with the social construction of knowledge—a position widely supported in gifted education practice. Newer, broader conceptions of metacognitive, self-regulated, and self-regulated learning processes have garnered interest. However, because these theories borrowed language from each other and earlier theories, assigning new meanings to old constructs, confusion arose about how to distinguish each of these three theories from each other or apply them to instruction. This article distinguishes among metacognition, self-regulation, and self-regulated learning, relating each to notions of giftedness, highlighting implications for practice, and especially highlighting self-regulated learning as a valuable contributor to understanding giftedness and designing instruction in gifted education.

Gifted underachievement within a self‐regulated learning framework: Proposing a task‐dependent model to guide early identification and intervention

“…In the absence of a theoretical framework, several SRL processes have received isolated and limited attention in gifted underachievers (e.g., strategic planning, self-evaluation). These gaps may be due to misconceptions defining SRL, as it has frequently been confused more narrowly with metacognition and more broadly with self-regulation (Oppong, Shore, & Muis, 2019).…”

Problem Finding and Evaluative Thinking among Gifted and Nongifted Students

“…Other metacognitive skills that have been studied in gifted individuals include planning (Grover, 1987), monitoring (Snyder et al, 2011), metacognitive knowledge (Schraw PROBLEM FINDING, DIVERGENT THINKING AND EVALUATIVE SKILLS 4 & Graham, 1997), and self-regulation (Oppong et al, 2019). However, no empirical studies have investigated the relationship between intrapersonal evaluation and PF among gifted learners.…”

Development of attentional networks in intellectually gifted children

“…The specificity of intellectual giftedness concerns on the high capacity to learn and to generalize their newly acquired knowledge in other contexts (Calero et al, 2011;Vogelaar et al, 2017aVogelaar et al, , 2017bVogelaar et al, , 2019. This high learning capacity might be tied to their high performance in reasoning (Caropreso & White, 1994), working memory (Calero, García-Martín, Jiménez, Kazén, & Araque, 2007;Hoard, Geary, Byrd-Craven, & Nugent, 2008;Leikin, Paz-Baruch, & Leikin, 2013;van Viersen, Kroesbergen, Slot, & de Bree, 2014), metacognitive abilities (Oppong, Shore, Muis, 2019) and executive functions (Arffa, 2007).…”