Designing a multimodal pedagogical model in gifted education: impacts on representational competence of teachers of gifted

Abstract

The current study is an educational design research on the design, implementation and evaluation a differentiated pedagogy (called Multimodal Pedagogical Model) which is aimed at improving representational competence skills of teachers of gifted (ToG). It was aimed to describe design process of the model and developmental process of ToG during and after the intervention. Participants were chosen by convenience sampling. The six teachers voluntarily accepted to participate. Two of them are male, four of them are female. Data were collected through multimodal representations designed by the teachers, the interpretations made by them to their representations, the discussions made on designs and model during classrooms, and the interviews realized with participants and experts. Data obtained from artefacts were analyzed according to the analytical frameworks improved by the researcher. Interviews and discussions were analyzed qualitatively through content analysis. At the end of the micro cycle 1 and 2, findings showed that teachers gained abilities of identifying, but they were not qualified at selecting/designing and evaluating multimodal representations. At the end of the micro cycle 3 and 4, findings revealed that teachers were able to design different types of multimodal representations, but also they were able to identify different types of intermodal mechanisms, and for what purposes they designed. At the end of the micro cycle 5, results indicated that teachers were able to identify and analyze adequacy of multimodal representations, they were also able to criticize to what extent the representation reflects the intermodal relations pointed. Briefly, these parameters showed that teachers can be called as representational competent. At the end of the educational design research, the MpM and its design principles revealed as a result of all these iterations in a solid structure/a desirable design. Findings revealed that applying the MpM and its principles improve representational competence skills of ToG.