The purpose of this study was to examine how students' in faculty of behavioural sciences understand and determine concept of giftedness, gifted student and teaching methods of gifted students. Research questions were (1) How do you understand and determine the concept of giftedness? (2) How do you recognize a gifted student? (3) How should the teaching of gifted students be differentiated and with what kind of methods? The first section of theory defined giftedness and what is giftedness and also teachers being determiners of giftedness. The second section of theory defined differentiation teaching in gifted students' point of view. The third section defined boundaries for teaching in elementary school. This study was a qualitative research completed with quantitative figures. The research material was gathered from students in faculty of behavioural sciences with a questionnaire. Materials were analyzed with theory-based content analyses. Similarities and differences was found between the research material and the research theory. As was assumed the was no inclusive concept of giftedness to be found based on this study. Also, the recognition of gifted student was found to be difficult and more or less the gifted seemed to be a student who was performing academically well. Problem solving, differentiation in lessons and extra assignments seemed to be the best methods of teaching to gifted students. The least effective was acceleration and quantitative augmentation of assignments.

Aims. All students, regardless of their capacity, should be offered impartial learning opportunities. Usually, it is well attended that each student will achieve learning goals. The gifted students are often unrecognized and ignored in school in everyday life. We must learn to recognize gifted students to provide them teaching that corresponds to their abilities. The reliable identification of giftedness is challenging. The mathematically gifted student brings both challenges and opportunities for teaching. There is a variety of differentiation methods to be used in teaching mathematics depending on pupils' needs and on the resources of the schools. The purpose of this study was to find out how the class teachers define mathematically gifted students, to find out the differentiation ways of teaching mathematics and to find out the class teachers' experiences of differentiation in mathematics. Methods. The study was a qualitative case study. The survey was conducted by interviewing the three class teachers, who had been selected for the research because of their interest of differentiation in mathematics. The direction based content analysis was used for the analysis of the research material. Results and conclusions. The teachers recognized the features of mathematical giftedness in their pupils. However, it was challenging for them to identify whether the students are really gifted or only a very successful at school work. The teachers used many ways to differentiate teaching of mathematics. Especially functional teaching was used as a mean to differentiate teaching. The teachers' experiences of differentiation in mathematics were very positive. The results of the study can be used by class teachers when they plan their differentiation in mathematics.

The aim of this study is to examine parents’ learning-related mindsets and parental praise in two different neighbourhoods. The framework for this study comes from Carol Dweck’s (1999, 2006) mindset theory which proposes that people hold different implicit beliefs about the malleability of human attributes, such as intelligence and giftedness. The characteristic of human nature is the capability to change and grow. A person with a growth mindset believes that qualities are malleable and can be developed over time, but having a fixed mindset, core qualities are perceived as built in and fixed by nature. This research context centres around the findings of increased social segregation and differentiation in education across families, and hence concern about educational equality. Mindsets develop in the environment where people grow up, most notably at school and home. Previous research has established that parents’ implicit beliefs about learning play an essential role in child’s development, and parental praise is a significant vehicle to support the implicit beliefs of children and improve learning. The data of this quantitative case study (N = 693) was collected with a questionnaire during the years 2016–2017 as part of a Copernicus research project. K-means clustering was used to form intelligence and giftedness mindset groups and differences between groups were analysed using Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis -tests. Based on exploratory factor analysis, the different ways of parental praise were compared with Mann-Whitney U tests and linear regression analysis was utilized to identify how given feedback is related to parents’ mindsets. Cronbach alpha was used to evaluate the internal reliability of the sums of variables. The results indicated that there were significant differences between the mindsets that caregivers hold and groups of fixed, growth and mixed mindset were found. Intelligence is perceived as a more malleable trait than giftedness among parents. This study also revealed gender and socioeconomic differences in mindsets. Four ways of parental praise were discovered: neutral, process, person and luck praise. The parents were more likely to adopt neutral and process praise, but differences between schools were also found. Parents’ growth mindset indicates at least partially given process praise and luck praise is explained by fixed mindset. Findings suggest that parents might not know how to actualize their growth mindset in process-focused praise.