• Journal of Gifted/Talented Education
• /
• v.22 no.3
• /
• pp.729-755
• /
• 2012

As an effort to understand alienated gifted students, we investigated learning characteristics and learning tactics of a scientifically gifted student with economic difficulty and physical disadvantage. The student we studied is attending the Saturday Physics Class which is an after school science activity offered by our university. We adopted techniques of qualitative case study. Participant observation was carried out at the field and the interview was done with the participant, his mother, and his teacher of 5th grade. Field documents and self-reports were used to understand the student synthetically. As a result, learning characteristics of the participant could be summarized as a spontaneous learning which originated from the internal motivation and struggle for learning to overcome the sense of inferiority and isolation from the peers. The participant adopted a strategic method for learning to satisfy his learning desire given the circumstance of socioeconomic and physical disadvantage: the three tactics we found were various learning routes, meta-cognitive ability and fervent response.