A Survey of the Relationship between Talent Identification Activities of Schools and Identity Dimensions of Students

In recent documents issued by the Ministry of Education, the word "Identity" has been frequently repeated and underlined. One of the main missions of the talent identification activities of schools is to foster different dimensions of identity such as personal identity, social identity and religious identity. In this regard, this research is designed to identify whether there is any meaningful relationship between talent identification activities and identity dimensions (personal, social and religious). 24 schools housing 540 (male and female, rural and urban, guidance- and high-school) students were selected as the statistical sample through stage sampling method. In each school, two kinds of questionnaire were applied. One of them was also answered by talent identification teachers to assess the activities of the schools in the school year 2010-2011. The results showed that the student's scores for personal identity were high. Although their scores for social as well as religious identity were over average, they were not satisfactory. As reported by talent identification teachers, the activity level of 34% schools was high, 34% medium and 31% low. Among them, girl's schools were better than boys, and urban schools outperformed rural ones. In regard of the main pivot of this research, the results showed that there is generally a positive meaningful relationship between talent identification activities of schools and social identity of the students while there is no relationship between these activities and the other two dimensions. Analysis of the results after the detachment of variables showed that there was no meaningful relationship in 19 cases, negative relationship in three cases and positive relationship only in two cases of the total 24 cases. These results may lead to this conclusion that talent identification activities have no important role in the formation of identity dimensions of students.