The Big-Five-Personality and Academic Self-Concept in Gifted and Non-Gifted Students: A Systematic Review of Literature

Abstract

Gifted students provide interesting opportunities for careers in all professional areas. To benefit from that chance, the promotion of gifted students moves more and more into focus of educational research and becomes an important facet of today’s teachers’ professional competencies. To meet these requirements, teacher training courses must be offered which are based on current state of research. This article presents a systematic literature review which investigates the current research state regarding quantitative studies of gifted students’ personality and self-concept. To assess a comparable state of research about the personality of gifted students the Big-Five model of personality was considered as a criterion for admission. A total of 40 quantitative studies was included. Results for personality of gifted students show that there are only a few studies which deliver comparable and valid data. Gifted students’ academic self-concept seems well researched, but indications of a multilayered subject specific academic self-concept receive little attention. Recommendations include a higher focus on students gifted in specific subjects, to find valid implications for their individual promotion.

Examining Personality Differences between Scientifically Gifted and Nongifted Students: Indications for Gifted Education and Teacher Trainings

“…Findings that gifted students have lower Neuroticism (Limont et al, 2014;Zeidner & Shani-Zinovich, 2011) might possibly be observed in scientifically gifted students as well, due to a higher self-concept (Peperkorn & Wegner, 2021, submitted for publication). There are no findings which indicate that there are significant differences in Extraversion between intellectual gifted and nongifted students (Peperkorn & Wegner, 2020). However, differences might be observed in Extraversion, because scientific work includes presentations and open discussions (Bell et al, 2010), which require a certain degree of being extraverted.…”

“…All existing studies about gifted students' personality refer to a general concept of giftedness. As a result, there is a considerable lack of comparable studies that measure domain-specific giftedness, beyond intelligence as a factor for cohort assignment (Peperkorn & Wegner, 2020). Hardly any other studies used alternative measures, such as school performance, domain-specific intelligence tests or direct measures of domain-specific skills (Sternberg, 2018).…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the Big Five personality factors in scientifically gifted students. Previous studies found that gifted students scored significantly higher for Openness and lower for Neuroticism, but all defined giftedness as a certain IQ score (Peperkorn & Wegner, 2020). Since there are no studies that compare scientifically gifted and scientifically nongifted students, possible differences in all five personality factors were investigated.…”

Gender, School Background, Personality, and Performance of Gifted and Regular Students in Indonesian National Competitions

“…Previous studies assessed a link between personality and students' academic performance in Russia (Papageorgiou et al, 2020), in Germany (Höffler et al, 2019), and in Bangladesh (Faisal, 2019). Although various conceptualizations of personality exist, the most persistent results were derived from the Big Five personality traits (Peperkorn & Wegner, 2020).…”

Diferencias en el autoconcepto entre alumnado con altas capacidades y alumnado general: un metaanálisis desde 2005 hasta 2020

“…Gifted students have an asynchronous development -i.e., their cognitive development is faster than others such as their emotional and physical development-, and this makes them display special social and emotional characteristics (Rinn & Majority, 2018). Numerous studies have addressed whether gifted students have higher or lower levels of socioemotional adjustment than their non-gifted peers in different constructs such as emotional intelligence (Alabbasi et al, 2020), personality (Peperkorn & Wegner, 2020) or perfectionism (Stricker et al, 2019). However, differences on socioemotional characteristics between gifted and non-gifted students are still under discussion (Alabbasi et al, 2020).…”