Abstract:

The paper focuses on the gifted children who are referred to as pupils with dual exceptionality - children who have been diagnosed as gifted by pedagogical-psychological counsellors and at the same time have some other diagnoses. Most often these may be specific learning disabilities, behaviour or autistic spectrum disorders. Our goal is to start mapping the situation to see if we can go into this topic further. We focused on two views – how it is perceived by teachers and by parents. We hope clarification of the situation is the first step to its improvement. We conducted a questionnaire survey among parents of these children and also among teachers. The results provide a comprehensive picture of what obstacles both sides face in education of this group of children. As part of the questionnaire survey, we tried to find teachers’ and parents’ opinions on what could contribute to improvement of education of these children and what positive experience from the school environment they have.

In introduction we present the theoretical background and current knowledge. In the methodology section, we then describe how we process our research question using a questionnaire survey. The answers to the questionnaires, whether open or closed, form a database of our research and are processed in the results section. Furthermore, in the discussion, we interpret the results and consider what image the situation provides us with even a small research sample and how we could contribute to its improvement. In conclusion, we emphasize that our conclusions have limits in generalization caused by a small number of respondents. However, based on our experience, we believe that the conclusions are relevant and it already makes sense to prepare a contribution to improving the situation.

At this point, we believe that it will be sufficient to reach the respondents via Facebook groups (Gifted children, Suggestions and inspirations for the 1st grade, Suggestions and inspirations for the 2nd grade), assuming that the return on answers will not be too high. It is important for us to get at least some contacts at this stage and to form a first idea of where parents and teachers see the pitfalls of caring for pupils with double exceptionality.

The authors are interested in educating gifted students from various perspectives, which is processed by the first author in her dissertation. Gifted students are often accompanied by a second exception, which overlaps their talents and makes it difficult to identify them.

Keywords:

Differentiation, giftedness, children with dual exceptionality, specific learning disabilities, pupils at-risk.