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...high schools and 176 students from the general high schools in Korea. Participants responded to the Thinking Styles Inventory (Sternberg & Wagner, 1992) and Scientific Giftedness Inventory (Shim & Kim, 2003). Results indicated that Korean gifted students had higher scores than nongifted students in all factors, including scientific accomplishment, leadership, creativity, morality, motivation, and cognitive experimentalism. In addition, Korean gifted students prefered the legislative, judicial, anarchic, global, external, and liberal styles, whereas Korean nongifted students prefered the executive, oligarchic, and conservative styles. Results from the stepwise multiple regression analysis procedures indicated that the subscales of thinking styles could be significant predictors of scientific giftedness.
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The development and implementation of school gifted programs should be based on gifted students' psychological characteristics and intellectual abilities. Sternberg (1988) pointed out that one cannot fully understand intellectual abilities unless one also knows how individuals apply them in adapting to the demands of their environment.
Sternberg's (1988, 1990, 1997) theory of mental self-government addresses intellectual styles as an interface between intelligence and personality. The basic assumption is that the way individuals use their mind is analogous to the various dimensions of government in the external world. At the heart of this theory is the notion that people need to somehow govern and manage their everyday activities. Just as there are many ways of governing a society, there are many ways of governing or managing one's daily activities. These different ways of governing or managing activities are what Sternberg (1988, 1990, 1994) calls "thinking styles." Sternberg's theory postulated 13 thinking styles that fall along five dimensions: functions (legislative, executive, and judicial thinking styles), forms (hierarchical, oligarchic, monarchic, and anarchic thinking styles), levels (global and local thinking styles), scopes (including internal and external thinking styles), and leanings (liberal and conservative thinking styles) of the mental self-government. Most people are at least somewhat flexible in their use of styles and try, with varying degrees of success, to adapt themselves to the stylistic demands of a given situation. Thus, an individual with a style preference in one situation may have a different preference in another situation. Table 1 presents the 13 thinking styles and sample items of mental self-government.
Zhang and Sternberg (2000) proposed that thinking styles and learning approaches are related: They hypothesized that the surface approach was positively and significantly correlated with styles associated with less complexity and negatively and significantly correlated with the legislative, judicial, liberal, and hierarchical styles. They also hypothesized that the deep approach was positively and significantly correlated with styles associated with more complexity and negatively and significantly correlated with the executive, conservative, local, and monarchic styles. Zhang (2002a, 2002b) has investigated the relationship between thinking styles and academic performance and modes of thinking among U.S. university students. According to his research, the more creativity-generating and more complex thinking styles are significantly related to a holistic mode of thinking, and the more norm-conforming and more simplistic thinking styles are significantly related to an analytic mode of thinking.
The initial evidence bears out some of the theoretical and practical significance of thinking styles. For example, teachers have been found to give more favorable evaluations to students whose thinking styles match their own, and secondary teachers are more likely to have an executive style than elementary teachers (Grigorenko & Sternberg, 1995, 1997). On the other hand, Sternberg (1994) proposed that various styles of mental self-government are also relevant to important issues regarding gifted learners. According to Sternberg and Grigorenko (1993), the implications of thinking styles for gifted education include issues of acceleration versus enrichment and individualistic versus cooperative learning structures.
Dai and Feldhusen (1999) suggested that gifted adolescent learners are quite diverse in thinking styles despite the fact that they have a relatively homogeneous profile of academic abilities and achievement. However, research that applies this model of thinking style to gifted students is still rare. As we have been able to show, there is some research on the relationship of thinking and learning styles to other variables, but not on the interrelationship of thinking styles and characteristics of giftedness.
The implicit theories and conceptions of giftedness are currently seen as residing in the minds of theorists, who can be either experts or laypersons (Sternberg & Zhang, 1995). The implicit theorists not only define giftedness, but also articulate the implications of their definitions. Theories of this kind deal with people's conceptions of a phenomenon, rather than dealing directly with the phenomenon itself. They are tested not by looking at the performance of people who are gifted, but by asking people what they mean by "giftedness" or some other construct (Sternberg, Conway, Ketron, & Bernstein, 1981).
It could be assumed that the implicit concepts of giftedness are different across cultures. For example, Zhang and Sternberg (1998) investigated the implicit concept of "excellence" among Chinese teachers in Hong Kong and compared them with the implicit concept of "excellence" among people in the U.S. They found that, in Hong Kong, unlike in the U.S., participants had higher expectations of excellence for boys than for girls. Thus, it may be culturally inappropriate when protocols for identifying gifted children are exported from one culture to another, particularly...
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