From February 6 to 8, 1958, approximately 200 educators and interested individuals were invited to New York City in hopes of discussing the education of academically talented students at the secondary level. Topics included identification, programming options, the social emotional well-being of students, and the limited resources allocated to…

The identification of his son's high ability can cause a father to confront his own experiences as a gifted child and adult and change his emotional life, family dynamics, and career. Over the past decade, Fiona Smith has worked closely with numerous multi-generations of grandfathers, fathers, and sons in Australia to analyze their backgrounds,…

The Hope Scale is an 11-item teacher-rating instrument designed to help identify academic and social components of giftedness. It provides insights from teachers who work with students on a daily basis, which may differ from the type of information yielded through achievement and ability tests. The Hope Scale development was made possible by the…

Many people correctly believe that a majority of innovators come from the population of gifted and talented children. If we want to develop innovative abilities of the gifted, then a special, new direction in gifted education is needed: innovation education. This article introduces innovation education, which refers to a wide range of educational…

In this reflective conversation, Ugur Sak discusses the current "state of the art" of gifted education in Turkey. He reviews the use of enrichment, discusses acceleration and reviews curricular procedures in Turkey. He responds to questions about the identification of gifted students and discusses the age old debate of talent versus…

Great performance is a wonder to observe. We may notice creativity, excellent technique, or content mastery. What we may not notice is a set of mental and social skills that allow a person to show his or her best work. This article recommends that these psychosocial skills be explicitly and deliberately cultivated via programming, coaching, and…

In a time of great flux and dynamic change in schools, from where will our future school leaders come? The answer, of course, is from a variety of places. By and large, however, most of these leaders are already in the nation's schools. Some are highly engaging teachers who have a particular knack with parents, some are department chairs…

Who, rather than what, decides what giftedness is? The academic world traditionally focuses on theoretical descriptors whereas society as a whole is more interested in practical function. This partly divided focus is becoming increasingly critical and problematic as economies are becoming global and the political objective is to create a knowledge…

As school psychologists move from dichotomous categorizations of students as "gifted" or "nongifted" toward a more comprehensive approach to identification, their task becomes increasingly complex. In the present article, the authors outline practices at the planning, programming, and data collection stages of the identification process in hopes…

This article presents a unified model for cognitive processing, WICS, which is an acronym for wisdom, intelligence, and creativity, synthesized. The model can be applied to identification/admissions, diagnosis, instruction, and assessment. I discuss why there is a need for such a model. Then I describe traditional models, after which I describe…

The purpose of this article is to provide the reader with a comprehensive yet detailed account of the current giftedness and gifted education situation in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. It is concerned with four main research questions: (1) How is "giftedness" defined in German-speaking countries? (2) How are gifted children…

The identification of the most capable students has been a challenge for school leaders. Although most states mandate that districts use multiple measures to identify students qualifying for gifted and talented programming, the issue often becomes that of defining and interpreting those "multiple measures." Gifted and talented students potentially…

Education has seen its share of trends and movements that either help or hinder the optimal development of the gifted child. In 2001, Congress passed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in a concerted effort to reach children who were not meeting minimal standardized goals of achievement. Response to Intervention (RtI) is yet another approach to ensure…

Discusses research related to identifying early predictors of school success or intelligence. Reports on a study that suggested correlations exist between how babies process information (visual attentiveness) in the first six months of life and the child's performance on intelligence tests in school. (ML)

This article describes the revision of the writing sample component used as one of five identification criteria for placement in a gifted program. A checklist of characteristics common to gifted writers was developed to be used in evaluating the students' creative writing responses to specific literature selections. A rubric for scoring writing…