About this Research Topic

Background

Over the past decades, the research on gifted students in Physical Education (PE) has had a double dimension. On one hand, some researchers have studied the behavior of intellectually gifted students in both PE lessons and the practice of physical activity. On the other hand, other researchers have focused their studies on pupils with motor talent and how PE teachers can adapt the teaching to those pupils. While talent in sports is related to specific aspects of each sports discipline (quick and adequate decision-making, speed of execution, correct technical-tactical gesture), the term talent in Physical Education (PE) implies superior mastery in most of the contents of the curricular subject, from sports initiation to corporal expression, going through contents related to fundamental movement skills and physical condition. In the context of PE, the potential motor talent of the child can be observed in a multidimensional way (physical, creative, social, and cognitive), beyond reducing the identification of talent to physical and/or conditional aspects.

The principal problem that we would like to address in this Research Topic is to go deeper into the appropriate treatment of these students in school, not only with talented pupils in PE but also with pupils with intellectual giftedness in PE lessons. How can they be identified? What is the best methodology to teach them? How do they feel? Which instruments are more adequate to be used in PE with them? These are some of the questions that we want to address with the manuscripts included in this Research Topic. The results obtained and published in this article collection will shed light on researchers, teachers, and families. We expect to help them discover more about the context and situation of these students.

To achieve these goals, we welcome all kinds of manuscripts: quantitative and qualitative that must follow the scientific method. We encourage manuscripts on any of the following topics:

- Pupils with motor talents in Physical Education.
- Gifted students in Physical Education.
- Physical activity in gifted students.
- Perception of PE teachers and families about talented pupils in PE.
- Studies related to the validation of instruments to identify talented pupils.

Keywords: Talent, identification, intervention programme, high ability, instruments

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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