Developing Gifted and Talented Education Program: The Malaysian Experience

Abstract

The Malaysian Education Act 550 (1996) outlines six dimensions of national education system namely, the pre-school, elementary, secondary, post-sec-ondary, higher, and special education. Thus, the other paradigms of educa-tion; for instance, gifted education, are not considered as mainstreams and do not give considerable attention towards their holistic growth. Even though in-itiatives to cater for the needs of local population of gifted students or stu-dents with high potentials were in existence since the 1960s', such efforts were short-lived due to factors such as lack of instructions, training, leadership, and resources. As such, the direction of Malaysian gifted education program— especially in the setting of school environment—has never been officially es-tablished and the effort to design appropriate curriculum for this population of students has never become a national agenda at the ministry of education (MOE) level. This article shares the experience of Pusat PERMATApintar TM Negara, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (also known as the National Gifted Center) in developing its' own gifted education school program, which offi-cially started in 2011.