Gifted individuals have unique social and emotional needs that often manifest as challenging interpersonal behavior. Chief among these needs are the fact that gifted students tend to be quite emotionally intense and that they tend to be quite cognitively rigid. Emotional intensity is defined as having stronger, more frequent, more complex, and…

Federal attention is focused currently on investing and improving the quality of early childhood education, so that children's potential and talent development can be used as a natural resource for the future of our country. This article engages readers in transitioning their thinking about early childhood gifted education from a traditional…

Children, particularly young children, demonstrate characteristics of giftedness in many different ways. These characteristics manifest themselves based on gender, experiences, cultural identity, personal passions and interests, and family or community. Gifted children develop asynchronously. Morelock (2000) stated that "asynchrony in the gifted…

Determining what giftedness is all about means focusing on many aspects of the individual. In this paper, the author focuses on letter D of the ABC's of being smart. She starts with specifics about giftedness (details), and then moves on to some ways of thinking (dispositions).

This paper discusses issues relevant to gifted children's readiness for school. It raises a number of questions that challenge thinking about what is meant by school readiness. Gifted children can often be ready for school entrance before the age traditionally considered appropriate. Their complex developmental profiles challenge accepted notions…

It has long been claimed that there is a strong association between high intelligence, or exceptional creativity, and mental illness. In this book, James MacCabe investigates this claim, using evidence from Swedish population data. He finds evidence that children who achieve either exceptionally high, or very low grades at school, are at greater…

Dabrowski's theory of positive disintegration describes patterns and explains mechanisms of human development and has been successfully applied to understanding of gifted individuals. This article shows how the concepts of chaos theory and self-organization such as the sensitivity to initial conditions, positive and negative feedback, bifurcation…

At the 2006 National Association of Gifted Children Conference, a panel presentation addressed the importance of providing gifted children with opportunities to take positive social action through service-learning; this article is a result of that discussion. The Future Problem Solving Program (among others) has a community problem-solving…

Recognising and nurturing giftedness in young children presents an important challenge to educators. This study sets out to identify and support gifted children through the provision of a rich learning environment in the Nursery (Kindergarten) setting. Practitioners in the Nursery aimed to provide cognitively challenging activities appropriate to…

Nongifted students (N=25) were slightly more curious than gifted Ss. Gifted boys displayed a greater curiosity level than gifted girls, whereas nongifted girls expressed slightly greater curiosity than nongifted boys; in both cases, no significant differences were found. Curiosity items rated the highest were associated with novelty, unknown…

A former child "prodigy" recounts her experiences at school to suggest that intellectual achievement is not always due to extraordinary analytic reasoning ability and that precocity may be nonrationl. J. Stanley responds by citing others' work on the topic and suggesting the construct may not survive strong scrutiny. (CL)

Argues that the intelligence, creative functions, and abilities of all children can be increased. The importance of parents as teachers is emphasized. Activities of the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in developing methods for enhancing neurological functioning and teaching parents to apply the new methods are described.…

The adaptation of Guilford's Structure of Intellect (SOI) model by M. Meeker to a kindergarten through twelfth-grade gifted curriculum is discussed. The key to the SOI model curriculum is diagnosis and prescription. The theory that 120 various cognitive skills can be differentiated and remediated underlies the curriculum. There are five workbooks…

Seven profiles of extremely gifted children under the age of four are presented. Examination of the cognitive, social, and emotional profiles of these children suggests that no singular pattern characterizes their functioning. (DB)

This report describes the second year of an award-winning summer enrichment program aimed at developing independent learning skills and encouraging lifelong learning in gifted elementary students. The program featured contact with university scholars actively involved in problem solving, introduction to general bodies of knowledge, and in-depth…