"Humanitarian giftedness" is the deployment of one's gifts and talents in a way that, at some level, benefits humanity. Humanitarian giftedness involves sharing one's gifts with others in a way that makes the world a better place. It is not something people are born with--they develop it in the same way other forms of expertise are…

Allocating students into separate classes within a school depending on their "ability" is common in many countries. This paper presents a theoretical discussion of the practice, considering why it persists despite a long history of research emphasizing consequential problems. Our discussion identifies and critiques four possible reasons…

There are two ways, broadly speaking, that one might conceive of meritocratic education. On a standard, 'narrow' conception, a meritocratic approach to education is one which distributes certain educational goods and opportunities according to merit. On a second, 'broader' conception, however, meritocratic education is an educational system suited…

Humans routinely use external thinking tools, like pencil and paper, maps, and calculators, to solve cognitive problems that would have once been solved internally. As many youth face unprecedented exposure to increasingly capable technological aids, there is a growing pressure to understand children's cognitive offloading capacities and…

Drawing from critical disability studies and cultural studies, this article unpacks cultural understandings of digital abilities. We analyse policy documents on digital education as cultural texts which communicate cultural values. Methodologically, we understand policy ideas as deriving from the larger culture. Our analysis first explores how…

Spatial ability has long been regarded as important in STEM, and mental rotation, a subcategory of spatial ability, is widely accepted as the cognitive ability with the largest gender difference in favor of men. Multiple meta-analyses of various tests of spatial ability have found large gender differences in outcomes of the mental rotation test…

The first section of this paper sets the record straight regarding many of Debouwere's (2024, "Review of Education," 12, e3445) specific criticisms. The second section discusses the magnitude of the SES-achievement relationship, specifically Debouwere's (2024) contention that the correlation is strong around 0.5 or 0.6 compared to…

Talent development addresses important components and stages of domain trajectories from childhood through adulthood, with the goal of providing opportunities for achieving creative productivity for those with abilities and aspirations to pursue that goal. The talent development megamodel (TDMM) identifies the interaction of domain specific…

Cognitive load theory has been in development since the 1980s. Much of the impetus for that development has come from firstly, replication failures using randomised controlled trials and secondly, from the incorporation of other theories into cognitive load theory. Both have led to theory expansion. The immediate cause of the so-called…

The Center for Gifted Education (Center) at William & Mary has provided diverse enrichment programs for high-ability students since 1988. With an aspiration to serve financially disadvantaged students, the Center developed and hosted a summer residential enrichment program in STEM areas. Camp Launch, for low-income, high-ability middle school…

Creative action is idiosyncratic. Not only do "creators" differ in their approaches to creative work, but "creative endeavors" differ in complexity, scale, and level of difficulty, meaning that the self-regulation strategies people use to manage themselves and their ideas from creative ideation to implementation may differ.…

High ability and talent development literature present different and sometimes competing or contradictory goals for talent development. One side emphasizes that talents should be developed to enable individuals with high abilities to make societal contributions, while the other side focuses on the individual's personal life goals. This article…

This article evaluates the predictions of an algorithmic-level distributed associative memory model as it introduces, propagates, and resolves ambiguity, and compares it to the predictions of computational-level parallel parsing models in which ambiguous analyses are accounted separately in discrete distributions. By superposing activation…

Senior executive strategic decision making is a prized skill. The analysis of available literature yields three key conclusions: i) strategic decision-making skills, especially in high complexity and ambiguity leverage 'adaptive expertise' which is very different from the dominant discourse on narrow domain 'expert performance'; ii) unlike focused…

Decades of educational genetics research have highlighted that differences in academic achievement are partly explained by genetic variation between individuals. Consequently, there is ongoing discussion about whether genetic influences on educationally related traits should be more widely acknowledged in schools and communicated specifically to…