Abstract:

According to Sternberg (2000), successful intelligence is the ability to achieve success in life, given one’s personal standards and within one’s sociocultural context, by adapting to, shaping, and selecting one’s environments through a balance of analytical, creative, and practical abilities. Aurora was conceived in 2004 as an alternative or supplement to the current methods of gifted identification generally applied to schoolchildren in the US, which traditionally have consisted largely of IQ-based measures. It is designed to address the identification and development of intellectually gifted children roughly between the ages of 9 and 12 years by assessing abilities in analytical, creative and practical thinking. It may also be used for more highly gifted children who are younger, or for less gifted youths who are older (Tan et. al., 2009). Aurora is currently being translated and adapted for use in Russia, Spain, Portugal, Slovakia, Israel and Saudi Arabia. This paper presents the work of translating and adapting the triarchically-based part of Aurora into Greek, as well as the first conclusions drawn from its first pilot implementation with Greek pupils. It describes how the working group was formed and organized, as well as the difficulties tackled regarding the linguistic translation and cultural adaptation. The test was piloted with 94 Greek pupils of the 6th grade in 3 schools of diverse socio-cultural environments. The researcher’s observations of the pupils’ responses to this new and innovative assessment and their motivation to take it are presented along with this first set of results.