Mediating Strategy of Learning for Children of Culturally Diverse and Disadvantage

Mediating Strategy of Learning for Children of Culturally Diverse and Disadvantage

This paper reports a study conducted for a group of students who possessed the learning potential of the gifted but not being identified. The participants of the study comprised twelve aboriginal and six international students of the Chinese ethnicity. They were students in schools in Taiwan. A dynamic assessment model was adopted to enhance strategy learning ability of the students. This model incorporated the graduated prompting assessment model and included the pretest_mediation_ posttest process. The assessment instruments comprised the New Edition of Chinese Intelligence Battery, the Manual for Dynamic Assessment, and the Recording Sheets. Findings showed that the participants had a wider zone of potential of development (ZPD) in the areas of figural reasoning, visual memory, figural integration and logical reasoning but a narrower ZPD in the aspects of verbal relations, verbal memory and mathematical reasoning. The mean ZPD was 1.5 SD in IQ score. The proposed dynamic assessment seemed to be feasible for discovering the learning potential of culturally diverse gifted and talented students.