The Saudi gifted educational and learning environment: parents and student perspectives

Despite a history dating from 1969, the current status of the Saudi gifted education environment is yet to be fully determined. Saudi gifted students and their parents were asked to complete Saudi-language versions of the Family Educational and Learning Capitals Questionnaire and the Student Educational and Learning Capitals Questionnaire to assess participant perceptions of the availability the 11 educational and learning capitals of the Actiotope Model of Giftedness. After transforming the responses into Rasch measures, matched paired comparisons of nearly 100 Saudi parents and their children were obtained. Our findings indicate that parents and their children differ in terms of their perceptions in the availability of four of the five educational capitals (economic, infrastructural, didactic, and aspirational capital), and three of the five learning capitals (attentional, actional and episodic capitals). We discuss the origins of both these differences and similarities before outlining the implications of our findings in terms of the effectiveness of the learning environment to support gifted education in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.