An Action Research on Talent Development and Its Effect on Student Performance

 

Perhaps some of you might know that a school-based talent development project called “The New Era of Amazing Grace of Talent Development” (NEoAGTD) was introduced to our school a few years ago. “NEoAGTD” in Chinese is titled as: “才俊飛昇新一代計劃”. Since “NEoAGTD” is the abbreviation of this specifically designed talent development programme, as students of the Programme, we simply name them as “AGTD” in singular and “AGTDs” in plural.

 

The Project “NEoAGTD” is rooted in schools as a platform where the talent development for creating a new generation of gifted and talented young moral leaders can be strategically fostered. It is expected that with such programme parallel to or even built-in in the existing school curriculum for years, the effectiveness of learning and teaching of the entire school can be further enhanced.

 

The chief aim of the project is to train up a population of gifted and talented students who carries high learning calibre to be aspiring, enthusiastic and independent life-long learners with strong moral leadership. The programme adopts a progressive and spiral approach to develop its thinking and action-based curriculum. It strives to equip the students with the mastery of understanding, enquiry, critical reflection and appreciation of effective learning.

 

The first batch of AGTD graduates completed their primary education and left us after summer in 2020. As an action research, we have tracked the students’ learning progress for three years with an aim to see if the intervention programme could help enhance the learning performance of individual students as well as their learning capability. We hypothesised that all students whose academic performance is above average should outperform themselves after undergoing a well-planned intervention programme with a focus on higher-order thinking training via inquiry-based learning as well as giving them chances to excel their potential in creativity and perseverance. Appended at the end of this piece of writing is a comparison table demonstrating how students have developed their talents after intervention.

 

The result showed that the longer the intervention is, the better the performance it will be. We used their entrance performance at P.3 and the exit performance at P.6 for comparison. As a result, 12 out of 18 AGTD students (Students A to R) who attended the completed set of programme till 2019-2020 have proved to be outperforming. Those (Students S to X) who left the intervention programme in the second year had a drop in their ranking in the exit exam. However, among all participants, Student P’s case should attract our team’s attention because early identification of the reasons behind might help to do remedy for that individual student if we believe that “Education should leave no children behind”.

 

 

Table 1:

A Comparison Table Showing the Academic Performance of 24 Case Students Before and After the NEoAGTD Intervention Programme from 2017-2018 to 2019-2020

 

 

Key:

BP – Basic Programme (基礎課程)

EP – Enhancement Programme (進階課程)

AP – Advanced Programme (高階課程)