Abstract

This article notes the low rate of highly talented or gifted students formally identified in Spain compared to international benchmarks. These students are not properly identified, so a lack of specific educational responses for these highly talented students is also expected. Trying to counteract this trend, this article presents an enrichment program imparted to a group of students with high intellectual abilities during the academic year 2017/18 over three weekly sessions during school hours, where emerging technologies were an important key in how it was delivered. The experimental design included an experimental group of high ability students and two control groups, one consisting of students with high abilities who did not receive specific educational responses and another consisting of a group of regular schoolchildren in terms of abilities. The results showed that the implementation of specific educational responses improved children’s levels of adaptation and in some cases, their school performance. These data are discussed in an attempt to recommend enrichment programs integrated into the classroom as an appropriate educational response to gifted or high ability students. Attention to diversity of all students in the classroom is possible, for example by resorting to ICT, increasing the educational inclusion of students with high intellectual capacity.

Abstract

The purpose of the present work is to rethink, in the university context, the concept of genius, related to the high intellectual abilities associated with intelligence; also, to connect the idea of entrepreneurial competences, such as leadership or social commitment. The hypothesis is that a university genius is defined by his high creative abilities and, in particular, entrepreneurial ones. From the methodological point of view, the recommendations of the National Association for Gifted Children were followed, and evidence collection was based on such practices, using the results obtained by two studies: the first one with professors and postgraduate students (from Argentina and Spain, from hard and soft sciences) who responded to a conceptual questionnaire, previously validated, in order to delineate common minimum denominators of geniuses. The other one comes from analyzing the results of an acceleration program of entrepreneurial competence with undergraduate students. Combining both data resulted in the need to think in an educational proposal (itinerary) with trajectories of excellence. One during the Degree level, with pilot training activities (in entrepreneurial competence), experimenting on a small scale; and the other in the Postgraduate level, encouraging them to be architects of their “routes”, allowing them to self-employ and to become agents of socio-community change.