Investigation of the effects of socioscientific issues on gifted students' deployment of intelligence, socioscientific reasoning skills and global citizenship understandings

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of the Socioscientific Transformational Inquiry Model (SDSM) on gifted students' attitudes toward transformational giftedness, their socioscientific reasoning skills, and their conceptions of global citizenship. Conducted within the framework of a concurrent/parallel mixed-methods research design, the study involved 17 gifted students in the experimental group and 14 gifted students in the control group. In the study, the SDSM program themed around renewable energy sources was implemented sequentially with both the experimental and control groups. The implementation with the control group was carried out immediately after that of the experimental group. The qualitative findings reveal that SDSM made positive contributions to the development of transformational giftedness attitudes and socioscientific reasoning skills in both groups, while yielding differentiated results across the subdimensions of global citizenship. The quantitative findings indicate that SDSM was effective in enhancing transformational giftedness attitudes among gifted students in the experimental group and socioscientific reasoning skills among students in the control group. Additionally, an examination of students' socioscientific reasoning skills showed that they achieved the highest scores in the perspective-taking and skepticism, and the lowest scores in the complexity and inquiry subdimensions. When the findings obtained from the quantitative and the qualitative measurement instruments are evaluated holistically, the effectiveness of SDSM in improving gifted students' attitudes toward transformational giftedness and their socioscientific reasoning skills is confirmed. Moreover, with regard to the global citizenship variable, a positive change is observed particularly in the "willingness to take action" subdimension. Overall, the findings demonstrate that SDSM has strong potential to holistically enhance gifted students' transformational giftedness attitudes, socioscientific reasoning skills, and global citizenship awareness.