Developing a Diagnostic Instrument for Scientific Giftedness in the Context of Design-Based Research (DBR)

Identifying and fostering gifted students is crucial in educational science and psychology. Giftedness diagnostics must be based on profound domain-specific concepts and acknowledge the variety of talents to enable a successful individual education. Growing challenges like digitalization, decarbonization, demographic changes, and pandemics increase the need for creative and productive professionals in STEM fields. Educational practitioners are expected to identify and foster these talents, confronted with the discourse between academic science and psychology about giftedness. Due to the lack of domain-specific diagnostic instruments, the individual expression of giftedness is often neglected during diagnostic procedures in educational practice and general intelligence tests are used instead. To address this problem, this paper presents the development process of a domain-specific diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness. To bridge the gap between theory and practice and incorporate knowledge from various fields, the development process is integrated into Design-Based Research (DBR). Therefore, we theoretically examine how the principles of DBR and test development can be connected. We present our research approach and check how the planned development process can lead to a test instrument suitable for practice and further knowledge about giftedness diagnostics. The project demonstrates that DBR is suitable for developing didactic interventions but can also lead to innovations in psychometrics and improve giftedness diagnostics in practice through additional quality criteria.