This issue presents seven original contributions from authors around the globe which are not only interesting for researchers, but also for practitioners. In the first contribution Jessurun, Jacobus, Shearer, & Weggeman introduce what they call a universal model of giftedness. It is a hybrid approach that combines strengths of previous models into a promising new model. It will be interesting to see how well is received in the scientific communtity and if it will be used by practitioners to guide their development of gifted education provisions.
Recenty, the issue of so-called iatrogenic effects of giftedness gained some attention, i.e. negative effects associated with giftedness. In line with this trend Košir, Horvat, Aram, & Jurinec pose the important question if being gifted is always an advantage? In particular, they were interested in differences with regard to social accceptance and self-concept. Their empirical study shows a generally positive situation of gifted adolscents, however, individual differences are substantial.
Laine & Tirri report in their stimulative contribution on the situation in Finnalnd, however the problem they focus on is prevalent in any country: Do elementary school teachers meet the needs of their gifted students? The descriptions regarding their gifted education practices were analyzed using a deductive-oriented content analysis. Thought some of the findings gave indeed some hope, for example the teachers fostered independent learning, results also showed that teachers clearly need more education in how to support gifted students more effectively.
Hernandez-Torrano and Tursunbayeva focus on the situation in Kazakhstan where gifted education is in recent years obviously increasingly flourishing. They conducted an experiment that was desigend to find out whether certain demographic characteristics of students like gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status influence teacher nominations of students for gifted services. The results were discussed with regard to implications of teacher nominations of gifted students.
An interesting research question is if honors alumni can be distinguished from non-honors alumni. Kool, Mainhard, Brekelmans, Jaarsma, & Beukelen compared in their study Dutch alumni who previously participated in an honors program with non-honors alumni who entered university as high-achieving high-school students. Results indicate that while in both groups job characteristics were found to be highly similar, honors alumni had a higher study GPA at the end of their studies as well as higher work engagement after graduation.
There is evidence that intellectual abilities of rural-to-urban migrants are higher than intellectual abilities of the rural or the urban population. Zhang, He, Tao, & Shi pursue this puzzling effect further with an interesting sample of intellectually gifted and average rural-to-urban migrants and intellectually gifted urban children. The main findings were that the intellectually gifted rural-to-urban migrant children developed more mature in terms of their attention than the children from the other groups. However, besides some advantages, there were also some disadvantages observed with regard to the quality of their attention compared to the intellectually gifted urban children. The authors thus onclude that rural-to-urban migration is a double-edged sword for intellectually gifted children with regard to attention.
Helsen, Baker, Schorer, Steingröver, Wattie, and Starkes investigated relative age effects in youth chess. Results show indeed an overall relative age effect among all Belgian youth chess players over the last years. The likelihood of participation was greatest for players born in the first birth-date quartile. These effects were more pronouenced in the under-8 and under-10 year olds. In addition, the authors found a performance-related relative age effect. Players born in the first months of the year were significantly more often in the top 10 players for each age level of the Belgian Youth Championship 2013.
In concluding my editorial, I would like to announce that the next issue will be a special issue. We will publish selected papers from the Inaugural European-North American Summit on Talent Development which was held in April this year in Washington DC.
Editor-in-Chief