From the Editor’s Desk

Welcome to Volume 38, Issue 1 of the Roeper Review. The authors contributing to this issue shed light on critical thinking, the nature and nuances of identification for gifted programs, the growing interest in response to intervention, and some dimensions of overexcitability.

Joyce VanTassel-Baska and Steve Coxon begin the issue with a tribute to the prominent critical thinking guru Richard Paul, who recently passed away. Joyce and Steve explain the importance of his work to our field in terms of both practical application and conceptualizations of higher-order thinking.

Response to intervention (RtI) is a multidimensional approach to identifying students’ needs and adjusting their learning opportunities. Most often considered useful in general education and special education, RtI has been making inroads into our field. In their article, “Development of a Procedural Guide to Implement Response to Intervention (RtI) With High-Ability Learners,” Stephanie Robertson and Steven Pfeiffer report on field testing of a method for RtI implementation with gifted students. Their analysis makes it more likely that this process will continue to extend and strengthen the work of practitioners in the field.

Dabrowski’s theory continues to draw considerable attention in our field, and our next two articles magnify that attention even more by scrutinizing a dimension of that theory—overexcitability. Kerry Beduna and Kristin Perrone-McGovern analyze connections among a number of important constructs including overexcitability in their article, “Relationships Among Emotional and Intellectual Overexcitability, Emotional IQ, and Subjective Well-Being.” They generate some interesting insights about the influence of some important affective and intrapersonal aspects of giftedness and talent.

In their article, “Overexcitability and Optimal Flow in Talented Dancers, Singers, and Athletes,” Paula Thomson and Victoria Jaque take this intriguing dimension of the theory in a somewhat different direction by analyzing the dynamics of overexcitability and the flow experience in performance domains. Our field can benefit from more interdisciplinary contributions, and this article, largely based in kinesiology, generates some helpful insights about talent-development processes.

Like some other fragmented, porous, contested fields, gifted education has struggled to clarify its conceptual foundations (see Ambrose, VanTassel-Baska, Coleman, & Cross, 2010; Dai & Chen, 2013). Much of this clarification revolves around notions of accuracy and fairness in identification procedures. In their article, “Predictive Ability of the SB5 Gifted Composite Versus the Full-Scale IQ Among Children Referred for Gifted Evaluations,” Mark McGowan, Dean Holtzman, Thomas Coyne, and Kristina Miles extend efforts to establish more effective, nuanced identification in the field.

A popular feature of our journal extracts gems of insights from leading scholars and pioneers within and beyond the field. We continue that tradition in this issue through an interview with Todd Lubart, carried out by Sue Henshon. Todd is a prominent creativity researcher who has done much to clarify the nature of the creative process, the effects of context on creative work, the psychology of creativity, and much more. As a field closely related to creative studies, gifted education has gained much from his work and will gain more in the future as his current projects come to fruition.

Our other interview arises from growing interest in domain-specific expertise. Both gifted education and creative studies have been illuminating the nature and influences of specific domains on high ability so our new “Ask the Expert” interview series, initiated two issues ago, extends the work on domain specificity by providing windows into the work of experts in various professional fields. Our first interview was with a pediatric cardiologist. The second was with a judge in the legal system. The interview in this issue is with Dr. Sven Strnad, an entomologist who carried out a considerable amount of research in the corporate world before making the career transition that put him in a fifth-grade classroom. Sven has won major national awards for his innovative science teaching largely because he finds his inquiry-based scientific work with elementary students at least as interesting as the work he did in a prior career as a research scientist.

Steve Coxon, our book review editor, provides two interesting book reviews in this issue. First, Bronwyn MacFarlane reviews Dumbing Down America: The War on Our Nation’s Brightest Young Minds (And What We Can Do to Fight Back), authored by Jim Delisle. After that, Michael Dragoni analyzes Play and Creativity in Art Teaching, authored by George Szekely.

Finally, to encourage interdisciplinary thinking in each issue of the journal, I provide an insight from one or more “foreign” disciplines. These insights are intended to help us cross disciplinary borders so we can explore phenomena that won’t remain confined within our own field. These interdisciplinary explorations take the form of very brief summaries of work done in the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences. Here is the selected insight for this issue:

WANDERING ALONG INTERDISCIPLINARY DESIRE LINES?

Marjorie Garber (2001), a prominent scholar of English Studies, invoked a compelling architectural metaphor to promote the notion that more interdisciplinary collaboration will generate progress in the participating fields. Architects use the term desire lines to signify the spontaneously formed foot paths in the lawn between buildings. These lines indicate where people prefer to walk, so planners of new building sites tend to install sidewalks where the desire lines show up.

In Garber’s metaphor, an imaginary college campus houses various disciplines in separate buildings. The desire lines indicate where adventurous scholars from these separate disciplines tend to walk when they leave their domain-specific buildings to engage in interdisciplinary wandering throughout the transdisciplinary campus.

The desire-line metaphor suggests that gifted education might be located in one of these buildings on the imaginary campus. Imagine that more of us leave our specialized gifted education domain every now and then to wander on the desire lines, occasionally bumping into theorists and researchers from diverse disciplines. Now imagine that you are one of these adventurous, interdisciplinary explorers. How will your specialized knowledge about giftedness or talent development creatively intertwine with some of the following concepts if you meet some prominent scholars on desire lines out on the campus green?

While walking along one of the interdisciplinary desire lines you meet Thomas Piketty, the renowned economist who recently published a blockbuster critique of 21st-century globalized capitalism (2014). During your discussion, one of his concepts strikes you as potentially useful in any field, including gifted education. Piketty described what he terms a scientific illusion that traps the minds of many economists. He elaborates on this illusion:

I dislike the expression “economic science,” which strikes me as terribly arrogant because it suggests that economics has attained a higher scientific status than the other social sciences. … For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content. (pp. 573–575)

This makes you wonder about the tendency for psychologists to claim that their discipline approximates the rigor and high scientific status of the natural sciences. To the extent that psychology influences gifted education, you wonder whether theory and research in our field suffers from the same scientific illusion. If our field does fall into that form of dogmatic entrapment, what might be the consequences?

Continuing your journey across the imaginary campus green you step onto a desire line heading toward the philosophy building. Here you meet the ghost of the pessimistic 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1651/1985), who tells you that humans left to their own devices will create lives for themselves and for others that are poor, nasty, brutish, and short. After overcoming your fright at meeting the ghost of this famous philosopher, you begin to wonder about the ethical dimensions of giftedness and talent. Are some highly innovative but ethically challenged gifted adults creating poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives for the disadvantaged in various societies?

Thanks to the reviewers who refine and strengthen the literature in our field and to the insightful researchers and theorists who publish their work in our journal. If you plan to contribute an article to the Roeper Review, see our author guidelines on our website: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=0278-3193&linktype=44

Don Ambrose, PhD, Editor, Roeper Review

Professor of Graduate Education

Graduate Department, School of Education

College of Liberal Arts, Education, and Sciences

Rider University

2083 Lawrenceville Road

Lawrenceville, NJ 08648-3099

[email protected]