The purpose of this research is to construct an elementary mathematically-gifted curriculum for both acceleration and enrichment in learning, taking into account the development of the elementary mathematically-gifted students' mathematical talent as well as their four abilities on critical thinking, communication and sharing, creative thinking and self-understanding.
The research is a developmental research. Through the mathematics achievement test, the researcher selected 20 fourth-grade elementary mathematically-gifted students. The teacher has been teaching experience for 20 years, and had involved in the program of the elementary mathematically-gifted students for years. The construction of the elementary mathematically-gifted curriculum lasted for two and a half years. The instruction time is about 12 lessons per semester and each lesson lasts 3 hours.
There are two major results. First, it is to develop a project for elementary mathematically-gifted curriculum, including teaching materials and teaching methods. The materials compose of open-ended questions, traditional mathematics questions, challenging questions, inducing new questions from changing traditional mathematic questions, comparing and contrasting solving strategies and their completeness and the history of mathematics. The methods include teacher-demo questioning, encouraging students to question each other, encouraging students to explaining their solving strategies, asking students to give dialectic their solving strategies, asking students to record the details of their thinking process, encouraging students to use different representations for solving same problem, providing guidance for students to reflect the congruence between their representation and formula, evaluating other groups’ solving strategies and making students to practice question-posing. It is proved that this project could effectively facilitate students’ development on the four abilities abovementioned. Second, we propose the mathematically-gifted students’ developmental hierarchy of these four abilities.
The conclusions put forward some suggestions for the applications of the elementary mathematically-gifted curriculum and future research.
Keywords: developmental research, elementary mathematically-gifted student, elementary mathematically-gifted curriculum