The relationships between field dependent/independent cognitive styles and information & communication technologies based programs in gifted education

Abstract

The research aims to investigate gifted students’ FD/FI cognitive styles and factors affecting them like preferring to take Information & Communication Technologies-based courses at gifted children’s school. The study was carried out on two groups.  First group consisted of 52 students identified as gifted who are attending 6th and 7th grades at the Istanbul Science &Art Center in Istanbul, Turkey,  the second group consisted of 38 students who are not identified as gifted and totally the study consists of 90 students. In order to collect data pertaining to this research, Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) was used to measure Field Dependence/Field Independence, (FD/FI).  According to the findings of the research, it has been observed that there is a significant difference between favored gifted students’ cognitive style scores and other students’ who are not identified as gifted. There is also a significant difference between in favor of Information& Communication Technologies (ICT) based course taking gifted students’ cognitive style scores and other gifted students who are not taking ICT-based courses in Science and Art Center. In contrast to these, there is not a significant differences were found on cognitive styles in terms of gender and grade variants in both groups.