Evaluating EGIFT as a tool for informing parents about gifted education and their child’s needs

Balanced research and practice

EGIFT is a free online learning platform for parents and teachers developed by European experts in gifted education to provide information on high ability students. Appropriate teacher education has been identified as an area that would help to support the needs of gifted students and changes need to be made at the teacher training level to provide guidelines for new teachers on how to work with gifted students. (O’Reilly, 2018). Additionally, we know that parents play an important role in the identification of their children and are their child’s most important advocate (Besnoy, et.al) (Mollenkopf et. al). In response to this, the EGIFT online learning platform was developed. The aim of this study is to evaluate the E-Gift programme as a tool to inform parents of high ability children about gifted education. This is part of a larger study which also examines pre-service and in-service teachers’ views on the programme.