Abstract
Gifted children have a very important place for the future and their societies so it is also crucial to determine their thoughts about themselves. Generally, the gifted children are one of the ignored groups and learning their current situation, emotions, thoughts and expectations is one of the most important issues. Due to this importance, knowing the gifted children's thoughts is important in terms of both drawing attention by creating an interest to this issue and shedding light on future studies about gifted individuals. Also, the application process of the study is important in terms of providing the children with the freedom of expressing themselves. The aim of this study is to reveal gifted children's thoughts about themselves and their senses of self. In general the answer for the question "Who are gifted individuals for gifted individual?" is searched in the study. In parallel with this aim, the children who are determined as 'gifted' and aware of this feature, are asked what they think about themselves with semistructured interview form, and they are also wanted to write them on the given documents. The data obtained from gifted children, who are in 4th and 7th grade, participate in the study voluntarily and chosen with purposeful sampling, were examined via content analysis method and commented. As a result of the study it was found that the participants knew that ability and superior ability are two different concepts and they define them differently. Further, the characteristics of gifted individuals, their strong areas, weak areas and the areas they are interested in and the reasons why they are interested in were also found in the study. It was also observed that the affective features of gifted individuals were developed and superior just like their cognitive features. According to these results, the number of studies related to the characteristics of gifted individuals can be increased. They can be given the opportunity of expressing themselves. It is also advised that in decisions regarding the gifted individuals the studies just like this study in which the gifted individuals were participated should be applied.