Gifted students should be taught not only for knowledge and for intelligence-enhancing techniques, but also for wisdom. What the world needs most, but also most lacks, is wisdom in the gifted individuals who become leaders. Teaching for wisdom means helping students to look toward a common good; by balancing their own with others', and with larger…

Two implicit metaphors can be seen as having dominated the study of the gifted--the savings bank and the investment bank. In the savings-bank metaphor, people have differential levels of IQ or general intelligence, which is viewed as determining whether they are gifted. Their cognitive ability is their metaphorical "money in the bank."…

Giftedness is usually conceived of in trait-like terms. But it often is expressed in the world in state-like terms--in response to challenging but often unpredictable situations where it is unclear who will rise to the challenges or even how we could know in advance who would be able to address the challenges at hand. Whereas traits tend to be…

Myside bias, a form of confirmation bias, is a major impediment to scientific thinking. It results in scientists, potential scientists, and consumers of science drawing conclusions that do not follow from data but rather that follow from prior scientific, ideological beliefs. Gifted people are at least as susceptible to these biases as are other…

This article reviews the implications of many of the major schools in the history of psychology for understanding giftedness and its inner workings: operationist, psychometric, psychoanalytic, associationist, behaviorist, Gestalt, cognitive, humanistic/positive psychology, functionalist/pragmatic/constructivist, cultural, and biological. Each…

In this article, we present a hierarchical model for teaching scientific thinking to gifted students. This article follows up on an article published 40 years ago in this journal. The problem now, as 40 years ago, is that gifted students often are taught science courses at a more intensive level, but without their truly learning how to think…

The field of gifted education, historically and contemporarily, is not well-known for being equitable for underrepresented students, specifically, Black, Hispanic, Native American, among others. In this article, we present a short history of gifted education with attention to key historical figures who have significantly shaped the field; their…