| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 自然科學教育學系碩士班 === 98 === The purpose of this research is to compare the performance of the Mathematics Achievement Test (MAT) between the mathematics-gifted students and the regular students. The subjects are elementary fourth graders, with 72 mathematics-gifted students and 169 regular students. The research tool, the MAT, is composed of questions on the concept of numbers, quantity and shapes, with 15 questions for each concept. Its coefficient of Cronbach α is .90 and the Rulon split-half reliability is .91. Regarding to its validity, the MAT satisfies content evidence, response progress evidence, internal structure evidence and convergent evidence. There are seven key results:
1. Mathematics-gifted students have the tendency to learn some advanced concepts (such as decimal division, fraction addition with different denominator, inverse operation of multiplication distributivity and the surface area of cubes) that help them to solve problem correctly. As for regular students, they may answer the questions by pure guessing or they may have some misconceptions on the mathematics knowledge they’ve already learned and both cause them to have wrong answers.
2. Mathematics-gifted students are able to intergrate all the conditions and their relations set in the questions and make corret judgement. Regular students are prone to rely on partial/incomplete information to solve the questions.
3. Mathematic-gifted students have better reasoning ability and they check for the rationaility of their answers. They can systematically and sequentially examine the possibility of every choice item and analyze comprehensively. Regular students are more likely to use the wrong quantity given in the question stem and they lack the self-monitoring and self-correcting ability during their problem-solving process.
4. Mathematics-gifted students can utilize diverse problem-solving strategies and have better reasoning ability and good generalization ability. Regular students may be affected by the implicit model of arithmetic operations and that causes them to have wrong solution.
5. Both mathematics-gifted student and regular students may by influenced by the implicit model of mathematic concepts and that leads both groups of students to have wrong solution.
6. Both mathematics-gifted students and regular students may have misconception on the unit transfer on different dimensions and this leads to both groups of students to have wrong answers.
7. The performance of both groups of sutdnets on using abstract thinking to transfer word description to concrete figures is only barely satisfactory.
Based on the research results and findings, some suggestions on the mathematics teaching, teacher training programs of the mathematics-gifted education and on further research topics are proposed.
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