Cultivating Problem Solving Abilities in Gifted Preschoolers

A three-year program, “The Enrichment Program for Cultivating Multiple Talents and Problem Solving Abilities for Gifted Preschoolers”, was put into effect at National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan. Participants were 61 children ages 4 to 6 who were gifted or gifted with disabilities. In this study, we report the children's changes in problem solving abilities in two different types of classes within the program: one in which all children participated together in activities involving problem solving in multiple intelligences (DISCOVER/MI) and another (Talent Development) in which small groups of 1 to 8 children with similar interests and multiple intelligence strengths participated in activities designed especially for them. The scores of teacher assessments showed that most students performed well on closed as well as open problem solving types (Maker & Schiever, 2009), especially on Type 1 (closed), Type 4, and Type 5 (open) in both types of programs, but that they generally performed better on the Type 4 problems than Type 5, and better on both open-ended types when they were in the talent development courses than when they were in the MI courses. Authors concluded that young children whose talents are just developing may perform better on problems with slight limitations (Type 4) because they have had little experience structuring problems, which is necessary in solving Type 5 problems.