Differentiated Instruction for Gifted Teaching Behavior in Classrooms: What Are the Levers of Change in the United Arab Emirates?

Abstract

Differentiation is recommended as the best teaching strategy to nurture gifted and talented (GT) students. While numerous studies have explored teachers’ perceptions of differentiating instruction for GT students in Western countries, the body of literature on this phenomenon remains small in non-Western contexts. This study attempted to understand the differentiation of the curriculum for GT students among teachers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Maker's model was used as a framework to guide development of the Gifted Teaching and Talent Development Scale (GTDS) and collect data from 239 teachers in the UAE. We assessed the structural validity of the GTDS using AMOS software to perform confirmatory factor analysis. Further, we used SPSS to compute multivariate analysis of variance, which revealed differences between background and latent variables (content, process, product, and environment). The findings support the use of multifaceted lenses to study gifted teaching behavior and its other implications.