641 Kuwaiti school students were selected for the study from thirteen public middle
schools in Kuwait (grade 7, age ~13). The schools represented a wide variety of social
and home backgrounds and are typical of the whole middle-school population in
Kuwait.
Middle schools were chosen as this is the end of the compulsory stage of education in
the State of Kuwait, with students still following a common curriculum and no areas of
specialism. The aim was to follow the grade 7 students through grades 8 and 9 in the
same schools but this is not discussed here. Middle school students are moving from the
age at which the manifestations of childhood are gradually vanishing and the
characteristics of adolescence begin to emerge.
In most studies, simply selecting a random cross section of the total student population
would be ideal but, in this case, with the focus on high ability, such a procedure would
not have given sufficient numbers of such high ability students. The sample, therefore,
contained 50% who had been classed as ‘gifted’ on the basis of high school grades or
whose grades in many subjects (but not all) were the same as those classed as ‘gifted’.
The remaining 50% were sampled randomly. Girls and boys are educated separately in
Kuwait and the sample contained 311 girls and 330 boys.
Four characteristics were measured:
(a) Working memory capacity;
(b) The extent of field dependency;
(c) The extent of divergency-convergency;
(d) Visual-spatial abilities.