Gifted Minds in Action: Unlocking Proportional Insight of Middle School Students

The present case study aims to investigate the strategies employed by seventh-grade gifted students while solving six alternative types of proportional reasoning tasks: missing-value problems, numerical comparison problems, and qualitative problems in both linear and nonlinear forms. Three seventh-grade gifted students attending Science and Art Centers (SAC) in Istanbul, Türkiye, constitute the participants of the present study. Data were collected during the spring semester of 2023 through semi-structured, task-based Zoom interviews. The findings show the variety and flexibility of strategies gifted students use, which differ by problem type. Therefore, the results highlight that gifted students demonstrate flexibility and fluency in solving proportional reasoning problems.