Czech Teachers’ Attitudes toward Typical Characteristics of Intellectually Gifted Learners with Dyslexia and the Issue of Identifying and Educating them

The presented study deals with the issue of basic school teachers’ attitudes towards selected behavioral and cognitive characteristics of intellectually gifted learners with dyslexia and the issue of identifying and educating these learners. Research is being conducted at the time as a Greek-Czech intercultural study. However, in the presented contribution only Czech research data are analyzed and interpreted. In the research, we used Attitudes Toward Giftedness/Learning disability – Dyslexia Scale by Greek authors Gari, Panagiota, Nikolopoulou (2006). This method was administered to 158 teachers from all over the Czech Republic. Based on statistical analysis, the presented empirical examination reached some important conclusions. It became clear that Czech teachers are good at identifying characteristics related to manifestations of a “gifted learner” and a “learner with a learning disability”. Moreover, they are able to identify also the so-called duality in learning abilities, i.e. the simultaneousness of ability and handicap in the learning process manifested in a particular cognitive domain. However, they identify this duality especially within Czech language. The most problematic appears to be the accepting of the existence of this typical characteristic of the given population of learners in other academic subjects, for example in mathematics. It is here in particular where teachers tend to expect nothing but exceptional performance, without a possibility of partial failure (they derive it from giftedness). It seems that due to the refusal of the existence of duality in learning ability intervening in all academic subjects, it can lead to a wrong identification of this minority group of the gifted. Nevertheless, this fact must be confirmed in further empiric research.