Ms. Fong is an experienced educator and counselor who has taught in Hong Kong’s primary and secondary schools, serving as a secondary school principal. She is currently the Vice Chairperson of the Society for Life and Death Education. She firmly believes that everyone is gifted by God, and that education plays a vital role in nurturing students’ potential and guiding them toward meaningful application. In recent years, she has actively conducted professional courses and lectures for the Hong Kong Central Library, various institutions, primary and secondary schools, and universities, fostering greater awareness of campus crisis management and life and death education.
This action research aims to investigate the effectiveness of service learning in cultivating leadership skills among gifted primary students in Hong Kong, with a particular focus on the dimensions of sense of responsibility, sense of commitment, and care for others. The study compares the changes in performance of gifted students and general students before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Although there have been advances in nurturing gifted students in creative thinking and STEM education in Hong Kong, the cultivation of their leadership skills remains inadequate, lacking a systematic approach and sufficient emphasis. This research uses the “Future Leaders” program at School A as a case study and collects data using the revised Emotional and Social Performance Assessment Tool from the Hong Kong Education Bureau to analyse the impact of service learning on gifted students in the aforementioned dimensions. The results indicate that gifted students perform significantly better than their peers in terms of sense of responsibility, sense of commitment, and care for others, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the lack of face-to-face service learning opportunities led to a notable decline in sense of commitment and sense of responsibility. This underscores the importance of face-to-face interaction. The restoration of in-person service learning has a positive impact on enhancing the sense of commitment and responsibility among gifted students. Further analysis reveals that the interruption of service learning activities during the pandemic adversely affected the care demonstrated by general students. Specifically, students at School A experienced significant score declines during the 2019-2020 academic year, likely due to a lack of face-to-face interactions, extracurricular practices, and social engagement. In contrast, gifted students appear to have partially mitigated these negative effects through alternative learning pathways or more effective emotional support, thereby stabilizing their care index. In conclusion, this research emphasizes the importance of combining service learning with leadership development and provides empirical support for improving future designs of gifted education curricula. Educators should prioritize increasing face-to-face interactions and experiential learning opportunities to enhance students’ sense of responsibility, sense of commitment, and care for others, and explore effective service learning projects designed for special circumstances.
