Giftedness has long been recognised as a cultural construct. Further, the processes and practices for developing talents are culturally influenced. Yet, there is little existing research into Australian Aboriginal understandings of giftedness and talent. There is a need to move beyond pan-Aboriginality when considering Australian Aboriginal views,…

In 1972, the United States Office of Education (USOE) released a lengthy and unprecedented report about gifted education in response to a Congressional mandate. Both Congress and the USOE lamented the inadequate state of gifted programmes in American schools and urged that gifted education should become a greater national priority. In this essay,…

For more than 90 years, terminology related to giftedness in Brazil has evolved, proliferating terms used to describe gifted individuals. Terms such as "superdotado" (the common translation of "gifted" into Portuguese) may lead lay people to think of gifted students as only those with extremely high ability or extraordinary…

Finding and developing talented youth from low-income backgrounds is an ongoing challenge for U.S. gifted education policy. These students face strong headwinds, whereas advantaged students enjoy favorable tailwinds, and these factors accumulate throughout K-12, higher education, and beyond. Jonathan Wai and Frank C. Worrell explain how talented…

Methods to estimate the causal effects of interventions are increasingly used in clinical medicine, public policy and social science. Using observational data, researchers can obtain causal treatment effect estimates without the ethical risks and time constraints that typically burden randomized experiments. The three studies in this dissertation…

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."…

Although the commonly accepted view is that there are such things as natural talents, more than 20 years of research suggests the opposite. What passes for talented is attributable to a combination of social and environmental factors. If the current research on this topic holds true, then there are implications not only for various theories of…

The case study of Michael Jackson illustrates the concepts of high potential, talent, and precocity in the musical domain. Studying this case of exceptional musical talent highlights the usefulness of a multidimensional approach to exploring human potential, which is not limited to academic abilities. It offers a better understanding of the…

The field of giftedness--including educators, theorists, and researchers--needs to show more cognizance of a phenomenon that is rearing its ugly head in more and more visible ways, namely, dark giftedness. Dark giftedness is giftedness used for bad and even toxic ends. Being gifted provides little, if any protection against the dark deployment of…

The University of Minnesota Talented Youth Mathematics Program (UMTYMP) is a selective, five-year accelerated mathematics program for students in grades 6-12. During the program, students take college mathematics courses on University of Minnesota campuses, starting with algebra and continuing through logic and proofs, linear algebra, and…

Based on the Actiotope Model of Giftedness, this article introduces a learning-resource-oriented approach for gifted education. It provides a comprehensive categorization of learning resources, including five exogenous learning resources termed "educational capital" and five endogenous learning resources termed "learning…

The beliefs and values students hold toward themselves, given tasks, and achievement itself can influence what tasks students seek, and whether they are able to obtain them. On the basis of previous research on underachievement and motivation, we developed the Achievement Orientation Model (AOM) to explore the issue of student achievement. The…

In this response to Sternberg's article, "ACCEL: A New Model for Identifying the Gifted," we agree that IQ testing may have outlasted its usefulness as an identification tool for gifted students. The field's commitment to an imperfect formula has neglected the evolution of offerings in schools and theoretical underpinnings that are…

In this article, we provide a response to the Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership (ACCEL) model put forward by Sternberg (2017). Our commentary focuses on four critical areas that do not receive sufficient attention in Sternberg's proposed model: (a) the developmental nature of giftedness; (b) that giftedness is domain specific,…

Providing an optimal match in the pace of instruction and level of content increases student engagement and is essential for all students. And while the idea of optimal match makes sense educationally, it can be challenging to determine what pace and level of instruction is optimal for gifted students. Fortunately, there is an effective,…