Rural school principals and teachers of gifted students from 40 school districts rated gifted teacher competency items. Results showed remarkable congruence between groups on the eight "most essential" teacher competencies, with greatest agreement on items describing direct instructional competencies but significant differences on items…

A summer program for gifted and talented students combined students' interests in writing and computers, as students worked together to create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, using computer word processing, graphics, and publishing programs to produce the book. (JDD)

Interviews with the coordinators of 37 gifted education programs (20 rural and 17 urban) indicated that rural school districts are less likely to use ability grouping or academic acceleration and are more likely to use sporadic extracurricular activities. An earlier survey of 171 teachers also found fewer program options in rural areas. (DB)

This article reviews present services in gifted education in western Europe (e.g., Britain, Germany, the Netherlands) and eastern Europe. Noted are individual accommodations such as individual acceleration and privately funded national competitions. Stressed is the importance of international communication in gifted education and specific…

African-American children are minimally represented in gifted programs due to misconceptions of giftedness, problems associated with standardized testing, perceptions of African-American students' low achievement, and lack of awareness of characteristics of African-American achievers. Individually focused identification of gifted African-American…

This review and commentary on research on signs of giftedness in preschool children focuses on feats and failures of child prodigies, development and measurement of early giftedness (including acceleration through developmental stages and early predictors of giftedness), and effects of caretaker child interaction on precocious development. (JDD)

Gifted, average, and learning-disabled children (total n=660) in grades four and seven were assessed on measures of achievement, ability, perceived competence in cognitive ability, self-concept, and locus of control over a two-year period. In general, perceived competence and self-concept were higher for gifted students and were stable for all…

Among 150 eleventh grade American Indian students, those attending urban high schools were significantly more creative than reservation students on 5 of 7 variables of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, Figural Form B. There was no significant difference between groups in academic achievement. Contains approximately 100 references. (SV)

This article reviews the literature on cooperative learning and ability grouping for gifted students and concludes that grouping, in and of itself, does not affect achievement and that grouping decisions need to be based on educational choices according to students' individual needs. Schools are encouraged to provide both ability grouping and…

This study, involving 158 prospective and experienced teachers' reactions to hypothetical students' patterns of giftedness, found differential predictions of success, recommendations for programing, and trait ratings for various patterns of giftedness and talent, suggesting sensitivity to "multiple intelligences." The influence of gender, race, or…

Gifted elementary students at the Center for Gifted Education in Columbia, Missouri, participated in a seminar designed to teach them the fundamentals of chess and other strategy board games. Students learned that beginning chess is accessible to everyone, learned problem solving and concentration, and created their own strategy board games. (JDD)

This paper describes two Department of Education reports on gifted education--1972's Marland Report and 1993's "National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent." It relates report findings to findings from a survey of states' policies. The paper calls for states to design programs that nurture talent potential of all students…

Five scales measuring self-esteem, social isolation, locus of control, alienation, and anxiety were used along with personal interviews to test the relationship between gender and adjustment in 88 gifted adolescents in Singapore. Gifted girls were found to have difficulty reconciling their giftedness with societal notions of femininity. (78…

This article examines available literature on a variety of options for accelerated learning in middle school. Different forms addressed include concurrent enrollment, guided independent study, combined enrollment, out-of-school acceleration, self-paced instruction, grade skipping, and differentiated or advanced class enrollment. A list of…

Describes a plan to split a problematic second-grade gifted class into two parts, fill the remaining seats with mainstream ESL children, and collaborate in teaching the classes. From the start, the children mingled socially and academically; student teachers could not tell which were from the initial gifted group. Heterogeneous grouping also paid…