According to the Swedish curriculum for the compulsory school, every teacher has an obligation to differentiate students’ education to promote their development and learning needs.

The study carried out in this paper is a qualitative interview study with Swedish teachers that have experience teaching particularly gifted students in mathematics. The study is based on the implementation theory where the aim of the study is to present an overview of different challenges that teachers encounter when trying to implement the decisions made regarding education of gifted students in mathematics. Furthermore, the aim of the study was to see if there were differences, and what those differences were, between the challenges that Swedish teachers mentioned versus the challenges that are acknowledged in previous international research. 

A deductive approach is used rooting the analysis in key concepts based on previous research. The key concepts or challenges we found were mathematical competence, student interests and motivations, appropriate challenge for students, inclusion, identification, prioritizing, time, materials, lack of education and collegial cooperation. We found plenty of similarities to the previous research on the area but could however also see tendencies in our study which hasn’t been discussed in the presented previous research. For example, we noticed that teachers in our study mentioned the importance of experience. We also noticed that some of the key challenges from the previous research didn’t seem to be as prominent in this study.