Write an essay based on one of these options and explain 3 concepts based the topic chosen     

Option 1 Adolescent Brain and Peer Influence 

Option 2 Gifted Minds

After discussing 3 concepts of your choice from one of the options, provide 3 examples of the application of these concepts in an educational setting. Ensure you support your discussion and examples with explicit reference to theory.

Introduction 

Each child is special in the eyes of their parents, and most parents try to strengthen the qualities of their child to help them excel in the world. However, there are some children that are gifted with stronger skill sets than their peers. Contrary to common perception, education attainment or succeeding in the specific areas is not easier for these children, rather they are posed with the stress of overachieving, acceptance in their environment and flourishing their talents amidst the resources available to them (Becker et al. 2015). Within our school system, many of these children are never identified, which leads them to 'fly through' the school level education, only to face challenges at the higher level. Meanwhile, if the gifted traits are recognized within a child, the burden of flourishing the said trait, and adopting resources, while maintaining a culture of equality and acceptance in the education system can arise (Renzulli, 2011). 

It cannot be denied that a gifted child can contribute more intently then their peers, however, such children also requires more attention and consideration in the early years. Through this research, the cognitive and affective characteristics of a gifted child are studied. It is reflected that the presence of these children within the classroom pose multi-level adaptation of the school curriculum, since, the needs of the classroom varies. In this sense, the challenges in front of the educator as well as parents in the management and development of these children are studied through a contextual and theoretical framework.

Gifted children and cognitive and affective characteristics

A gifted child is identified as a high-level performer in one or multiple fields of interest. In their review, Arancibia et al. (2016) reflect that these children are born with superior cognitive abilities than their peers, especially with respect to the processing speed, metacognitive skills that develops their analytic and complex thinking, knowledge base and problem solving as well as analytic skills. In addition, these children are born with higher curiosity, higher affinity of learning language and intricate information, advanced comprehension and larger retention abilities (Gibbons et al. 2012). As per Arancibia et al. (2016) a gifted child is more likely to excel in the cognitive abilities like creating link with new information to the existing knowledge. Since, most of these children are more aware of their metacognitive process, they also have a more analytic mind and are thus more inclined towards problem solving through strategic measures. Studies reflect that cognitively, a gifted child also excel in terms of competencies such as: internal representation and categorization, which in turn helps the children in the use of procedural knowledge.

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