With regard to the making and processing of school achievement, giftedness and inclusion, on the international level there is broad consensus that successful education systems are characterized by above-average achievement and below-average educational inequalities (OECD, 2015). Taking this up, we ask in our study achievement, inclusion, and giftedness are discussed in relation to one another in the international scientific discourse. There are some studies on the connection between giftedness and achievement and, in the broadest sense, inclusion on the level of students, teaching and the institutional or structural level (e.g. Böker & Horvarth, 2018; Kiso & Lagies, 2019; Seitz et al., 2016; Wienand, 2022). However, the level of discourse has been omitted so far (Seitz & Kaiser, i.p.; Seitz et al, 2021). The aim of the discourse analysis is therefore to shed light on the rules according to which giftedness, achievement, and inclusion are dealt with in the international scientific discourse. To analyse the narrative structures concerning the relation between the concepts of giftedness, achievement, and inclusion and their structural conditions, the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD; Keller, 2013) was used. The data corpus was compiled by database search via ERIC (N= 97), while according to theoretical sampling along minimum and maximum variance 23 texts were included in the analyses. As a result, an overarching narrative formation on giftedness, achievement, and inclusion within the scientific discourse can be outlined. This narrative formation arises from five steps that structure the discourse: In a first step, the concepts of giftedness and achievement are related to inclusion. In a second step, this relationship is problematised with reference to educational policy agendas and a polarisation of the group of students described as high-achievers and those described as low-achievers is constructed. In a third step, group-specific interventions are presented for the groups of “gifted” students constructed in this way. Finally, these are explained by means of the underlying dispositif of achievement. Where relations to educational equity are put into focus, this is done with diverging understandings and conceptualisations of equity (Seitz et al., 2021). In our presentation, we will use two contrasting examples of the analysis to show how differences are produced and hierarchized by the construction of at-risk groups in the discourse of giftedness and achievement.

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