Gifted and talented students have outstanding performance or potential in some domains such as intellectual, academic, creativity and leadership. Also these students differ from peers in terms of some developmental and psychological characteristics. School counselors working with gifted students are expected to take account of these unique characteristics while planning and implementing their works. The aim of this study is to examine to what extent curricula of counseling and guidance (CG) programs include the theory or practice knowledge related to gifted and talented students. With an implementation that started in 2006, CG programs were tried to be standardized at all universities in Turkey. Therefore, the curricula of programs considerably overlap with one another, except elective courses. The current courses were analyzed through document analysis technique to determine counseling competencies related to gifted. Findings showed that there is no required course; however, there are a few elective courses about gifted and talented students. It was determined that the issues related to the giftedness are offered in a required course with a component focusing on gifted students. But this component is limited some certain conceptual knowledge instead of extensive theoretical and practical content.
The findings of this study revealed that CG programs have very limited content about gifted and talented students who are one of the special groups. The current curricula of CG programs are seen inadequate in terms of preparing the school counselors for serving gifted and talented students.