engleski

Identification and working with musically gifted elementary school students from the perspective of expert assistants

According to the Croatian Act on Education in Primary and Secondary Schools (2008) gifted students are classified as students with special educational needs. In elementary schools, besides teachers, the task of identifying gifted students is also given to expert assistants, primarily psychologists and pedagogues. Research conducted on this area indicate that the higher education of the mentioned experts still does not pay enough attention (or their further improvement) to the area of working with gifted students, although there is a strong interest in this (Vojnović, 2005). Early identification of students' giftedness in primary schools is crucial for the development of musical giftedness. When assessing a child's musical giftedness, it is necessary to use and combine different assessment methods and identification means that need to be reused. In order to approach the gifted child in an individualized way, after the initial identification of the level of musical giftedness, it is the task of the expert assistants, in collaboration with the teacher and other members of the professional team, as well as the music teacher, to create a plan to encourage and develop the musically gifted student. In this paper we will present research that aims to determine the opinions of expert assistants on the use of different methods of determining giftedness of students and ways of conducting activities for musically gifted students in their schools. It is expected that the results of this research will be applicable primarily in the applied sense through qualitative and quantitative analysis of the current approaches and providing guidance for further improvement of work with gifted elementary school students in the field of music.

musical giftedness, younger school-age childrenm older school-age children, elementary school, expert assistants

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