The Learning Characteristics of Gifted Literacy Disabled Students

Abstract

Some gifted students have specific literacy learning disabilities in areas such as reading, writing and spelling. The present study uses a ‘differentiated models of giftedness and talent’ framework to examine the learning characteristics of these students.

The students, 65 gifted primary school students in Melbourne, had a disability in literacy performance in at least one of reading prose accuracy, prose reading comprehension, or isolated word reading accuracy. Their phonemic awareness (segmentation and blending), and general ability using the WISC-III were assessed. As well, to provide an opportunity for the display of their gifted knowledge, tasks examining their ability to infer from what they had read for texts read accurately were used.

Scores on the cognitive factors of the WISC-III identified three categories or ‘profiles’ of gifted knowledge: students gifted verbally, nonverbally and in both areas. The three profiles were associated with particular patterns in literacy knowledge.

Comparison with matching cohorts of gifted students who were not literacy disabled (N = 60) and non-gifted students who had a literacy learning disability (N = 42) suggests that the literacy disability is attributed to lower use of analytic information processing strategies that influenced phonemic awareness knowledge and alphanumeric symbolic coding ability. It also showed that the gifted literacy disabled students could display their gifted knowledge during reading comprehension when provided with appropriate tasks.

The implications of this study for the diagnosis and teaching of gifted literacy disabled students are discussed.

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