Abstract

This experimental study examines the effects of Integrated Curriculum Model (ICM) on 4th grade elementary gifted and talented students’ academic achievement, creativity and critical thinking (Control Group N= 10, Experimental Group N= 11) in the social studies classroom context, in Istanbul, Turkey.  Integrated Curriculum Model was utilized to create a social studies curriculum unit named luckily it is present that both cover Turkish Ministry National Education aims and standards and goes beyond for that for gifted and talented learners in accordance of ICM. Research was conducted in a unique state school for identified gifted and talented learners by the Ministry of National Education branch named Counseling and Research Center for identification by means of multiple scales. Prior to the experiment  both experimental and control groups were attained equally in terms of use of scales academic achievement, creative thinking skills test and critical thinking skills test’s pre-test results. As stated above, Integrated Curriculum Model was utilized to create a social studies unit and implementation of its instruction in the experimental group while no intervention was made for the control group. After 8 weeks of implementation of the social studies unit, results of the experiment indicated that there was a significant difference in terms of academic achievement, creativity, and critical thinking between treatment and comparison groups.

Key words: Social studies, gifted and talented education, curriculum and instruction.