Advocates Chinese educational reform that returns the focus to elementary and secondary schools, away from higher education, competition, and promotion-oriented programs. Argues funds, admittedly limited, will be best spent on universal education that utilizes talent, improves the quality of national culture, and develops student creativity.…

Profiles the numbers and types of Shanghai (China) students studying abroad from 1978 to 1985. Discusses how many went at their own expense, and how many went with governmental support. Identifies ways to ensure students' return because the rationale for studying abroad is to improve the pace and quality of China's modernization. (CH)

Czechoslovakia's talented youth in the natural and technical sciences are served through identification and developmental activities in elementary and secondary school; postsecondary opportunities in universities, the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, and the Slovak Academy of Sciences; and the School for Young Talents, which prepares future…

Outlines how an artistically talented English boy has no place to develop his talent. Explores the history of educating gifted children and artists. Compares situation with other countries. Describes the type of institution that would be suitable for educating artistically talented children. (KM)

The value of the social context present in some specialized education environments to promote the optimal development of children who are gifted and talented is discussed. Issues and variables that might be considered when conducting research on social context in specialized environments are also considered. (SW)

Discusses research that examined the effects of melodic content and performance tempo on the ability of university music majors to perform previously learned music passages in new settings. Finds tempo accuracy and pitch accuracy were adversely affected by differences between originally learned tempo and tempi at which works were later performed.…

A study examined the educational histories of 120 talented individuals in various fields for recurrent patterns. The study found patterns for childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood phases. The importance of time, task, and communities of practice in everyday life is stressed. The Academic Talent Development Program, a summer program for…

This response to an article regarding the tension between talent development and personal growth in gifted education argues that dissociation of these two aspects is conditional, not a constant state of affairs. Contingencies and processes responsible for the dissociation are identified and ways to integrated these two perspectives are discussed.…

This article addresses the current knowledge base on the talent development process and suggests new direction for continued research and development. It presents current understandings about talent development both from a conceptual and operational vantage point. It also links the research bases of creativity and talent development. (Contains…

This article examines how a state, a district, and a local school in Texas are making steps toward meeting the first recommendation (setting challenging curricular standards) of the 1993 national report "National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent". Specific performance standards for students are listed and standard…

This article reports on the first 4 years of an effort to develop comprehensive and sustainable mathematics education reforms in high poverty middle schools. In four related analyses, we examine the levels of implementation achieved and impact of the reforms on various measures of achievement in the first 3 schools to implement the Talent…

This study investigated the reliability and structural validity of Elementary Reading Attitude Survey ([ERAS]; McKenna and Kear, 1990) scores in 575 academically talented students attending an academic summer program. Results indicated that ERAS Academic and Recreational scores had satisfactory internal consistency coefficients, and that…

Traditional conceptions of talent generally emphasise the construction of threshold values and the development of relatively unitary abilities, and this approach still dominates talent development programmes for elite sport. Most researchers on high ability, however, now favour domain-specific, multidimensional conceptions of ability that stress…

This article contrasts two major attempts at educational reform with regard to literacy. Starting with a brief background to the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy, together with an analysis of research into effective literacy teaching, it presents qualitative research carried out in the form of a comparative study of the National…

The focus of the study is the comparison between the musical abilities of 11-year-old children on the island of Martinique and in Slovenia, and finding out to what extent their development of musical abilities is influenced by musical and cultural family background, music school attendance, choral singing and playing orchestral instruments. Our…