In this study, the teaching strategies of mothers of 14 gifted preschoolers were compared with the teaching styles of mothers of 14 nongifted children of the same age. Mothers were individually observed and videotaped while teaching three problem-solving tasks to their children. These videotaped interactions were then coded according to the structuring and elaborative strategies used by both mothers and children. Results indicated that mothers of gifted preschoolers helped their children structure the tasks as goal-directed operations, highlighted perceptual and functional cues to aid feature detection, and encouraged metacognition to a greater extent than did mothers of children in the nongifted sample. Gifted children displayed greater comprehension of rules, subgoals, and functional relations among objects; in addition, they used metacognitive strategies to regulate their behavior more frequently than did nongifted preschoolers. Both teaching and learning strategies varied according to the structure of particular tasks. (Author/MP)