Evaluation of a summer-school program for highly gifted secondary-school students: The German Pupils Academy

The German Pupils Academy (Deutsche Schuler-Akademie) is a summer-school program for highly gifted secondary-school students. Three types of program evaluation were conducted. Input evaluation confirmed the participants as intellectually highly gifted students who are intrinsically motivated and interested to attend the courses offered at the simmer school. Process evaluation focuses on the courses attended by the participants as the most important component of the program. Accordingly, the instructional approaches meet the needs of highly gifted students for self-regulated and discovery oriented learning. The product or impact evaluation was based on a multivariate social-cognitive prerequisites for transforming giftedness into excellent performances. to some extent, the positive effects of students' self-efficacy and self-regulatory strategies are due to qualities of the learning environments established by the courses.