The objective is to have a comprehensive view of which motivational teaching strategies are, first, applied more often and, second, considered most effective for motivating cognitively gifted students in secondary schools. We will therefore in a survey study examine the motivational strategies of teachers in regular classrooms as reported by teachers and students, in particular towards cognitively gifted adolescents. Previous research has already assessed the effects of motivational teaching strategies on all students (e.g., Stroet et al., 2013; Van den Berghe et al., 2013; Vermote et al., 2020), but the group of cognitively gifted students has not yet been studied concerning this topic.

We will first ask secondary school teachers to rate their use of various motivational teaching strategies and their perception of effectiveness in relation to specific situations (Aelterman et al., 2019), thereby evaluating whether they customize their strategies to cognitively gifted and typical students. Since teachers motivational strategies are shaped, among other things, by student’s ability levels (Hornstra et al., 2015), we expect that teachers will use different motivational strategies with
cognitively gifted than with typical students (Hypothesis 1). Particularly we expect that teachers will offer less structure (guidance and clarification), offer more choices (participative) and respond with more understanding (attuning) to cognitively gifted students (Bakx et al., 2019; Hornstra et al., 2015).

We also expect to notice similar differences between both groups of students in teachers’ perceived effectiveness of teaching strategies (Hypothesis 2). Subsequently, we will ask the secondary school students from (a subset of) teachers’ classes to rate the same teaching strategies in the same situations. We expect similar differences between the strategies that teachers report to apply towards cognitively gifted, resp. typical students and the strategies that the gifted, resp. typical students report
(Hypothesis 3). Also, we will examine how the teaching strategies reported by teachers and perceived by students relate with a range of student outcome variables, including motivation, engagement and basic psychological need satisfaction. Participative, attuning, guiding and clarifying teaching strategies are expected to be positively related with adaptive outcomes and negatively with maladaptive outcomes, while an opposite pattern of correlations is expected for the demanding, dominating, awaiting and abandoning teaching strategies, both in typical learners (Aelterman et al., 2019) and cognitively gifted students (Hypothesis 4) Possible differential effects for both student groups will be explored.

Thus, by comparing the perspective of teachers and the perspective of students, we hope to get a more nuanced insight in which motivating strategies are equally or differentially effective for cognitively gifted students and whether teachers have an accurate view on these differences. The latter seems critical for teachers to tailor their motivational support to the target population at hand.