Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Educators working with twice-exceptional students have unique insights into the perceptions and
behavior of these students, as well as how they cope with their difficulties because teachers are
in unique positions to observe, understand, and reflect upon their students. For the twice
exceptional, it is critical to correctly identify these students and understand the ways that they
balance academic demands with social and emotional needs. This type of understanding is the
foundation for efforts to provide suitable special education services for this population of
students. To investigate this issue, I conducted a qualitative research study of current public
education teachers’ and coordinators’ perceptions and experiences related to how 2E students
experience and balance academic, social, and emotional needs and challenges.
The following questions guided the study, which employed qualitative methodology
What are the social, emotional, and academic experiences of twice-exceptional students?
For this study, I interviewed five gifted coordinators with former teaching experience and
one general education teacher. All participants had more than 15 years’ experience in education.
Open-ended interviews took a place in a natural setting, such as a library or school district
building. After all interviews with all participants were completed, the interviews transcribed,
by Creswell (2007). Initially, I described the personal experiences that each participant had with
the phenomenon being studied. Then I began to develop a list of significant comments, followed
by grouping these statements into larger units, or themes. The next step in the analysis was to
write textual descriptions supported by verbatim quotes. Following this, I wrote structural
descriptions describing how the experience happened, including setting and context. At this
point, I then combined these descriptions into a composite narrative weaving the threads of the
textual with the structural descriptions. The transcripts were reviewed multiple times and general
themes and categories were developed from the first coding, until common theme categories
Through a close examination and review of the transcripts, an initial coding system was
developed that reflected words and phrases that appeared throughout all the transcripts. These
codes were then categorized into general themes that captured the essence of the interviews.
Social and emotional issues were of primary concern, and teachers used both individual
instruction and grouping strategies in their efforts to help 2E students cope with social issues
such as maintaining friendships or bullying. Helping 2E students spend time in appropriate peer
interactions helped them both academically and socially. For example, one teacher had students
work with partners for projects and carefully selected supportive and cooperative partners for 2E
students who had interpersonal difficulties. Overall, the results of my study confirmed the
existence and importance of key issues that have been identified in other research. Furthermore,
this study indicated clearly the importance of adequate teacher training in the identifying 2E
provided me with basic knowledge about the meaning of qualitative research and the steps to
ensure methodological rigor. These steps include conducting a sufficient literature review,
learning how to conduct structured interviews, code and interpret data, and present the results. I
am now also familiar with methods for data handing and ensuring research credibility and
trustworthiness.
Some teachers were cautious about revealing issues in their schools so I focused on
developing a positive, trusting relationship, which once established, posed no further problems in
this respect. However, my lack of experience may have limited the degree to which I was able to
draw out more detailed information or additional information from participants. In retrospect, I
also see how organizing my themes into subthemes clearly could enhance the presentation and
I presented this research at the National Association for Gifted Children annual
conference in 2016. For this event, I created a poster that summarized my research. This was a
good experience because it was the first time I presented at a national conference, and I learned
In conclusion, through this experience I saw the real value of qualitative research. This
type of investigation provides in-depth and detailed information about subjective experiences
that is often masked or disregarded in quantitative research that uses larger samples and
cumulative data. Qualitative research is quite useful for accessing hidden or new issues that have
a strong influence within a specific phenomenon of interest. Related quantitative research can
build from good qualitative research to establish directional and causal relationships in variables