personality and learning styles of gifted children (1)

The first article, Personality, Learning style, and Cognitive Style Profiles of Mathematically Talented Students by Mills (1993), reports on a study that compared academically talented students to a group of same-age peers of mixed ability and found that they differed on four important dimensions of cognitive style (preferences for Introversion-Extraversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, and Judging-Perceiving). The talented students also differed from the general population of students on three personality scales (achievement, endurance, and affiliation). Although as a group the academically talented students differed from other students on these dimensions, not all gifted students looked the same. There were also differences within the gifted and talented group. In fact, a wide range of scores on the personality traits and all different cognitive styles were represented in the gifted group. It's just that the distribution of scores within the gifted group looked very different from that found in a general population of students. These intragroup differences were related to gender and whether the student had high math or high verbal ability. A surprising and very interesting finding in this study was that the Thinking-Feeling dimension on the MBTI appears to be a mediating variable decreasing the between-gender differences often found for math ability while increasing the within-gender differences.