Gifted Child Quarterly and High Ability Studies collaborated on this pair of special issues resulting from the Inaugural European–North American Summit on Talent Development. The summit, held in Washington, DC, in April 2016, had two main goals. The summit aimed, first, to increase researchers’ awareness of work on talent development being carried out in different countries by bringing together scholars working in Europe and the United States. The summit’s second aim was to initiate a new format for small, collaborative conferences at which participants present ideas they are working on – in medias res, so to speak – to all the other participants in order to receive feedback before they have completed their research. The event was made possible through the generous financial support of the American Psychological Association, the Belin-Blank Center at the University of Iowa, the Center for Talent Development of Northwestern University, and the Academic Talent-Development Program at the University of California, Berkeley. The two-day event consisted of clusters of presentations on eight topics. In each cluster, three researchers (two from American institutions and one from a European institution) presented their work and discussed future directions and possible implementations. Thanks to editors Betsy McCoach, Del Siegle, and Albert Ziegler, all participants were invited to submit manuscripts for publication based on their presentation. The resulting articles on work presented in the first four talent-development clusters (theoretical perspectives, societal participation, the context of school, and outside of school) make up the special issue of Gifted Child Quarterly. Manuscripts arising from presentations in the final four talent-development clusters (outcomes, psychosocial factors, adaptive and maladaptive learning, high achievement and performance) comprise the special issue of High Ability Studies.
Part I: Articles appearing in Gifted Child Quarterly (volume 61)
Cluster 1: Theoretical perspectives
Opening the first cluster, the article by Rena Subotnik, Frank Worrell, and Paula Olszewski-Kubilius challenges readers to imagine a brief interview or audition that could serve as a pre-screening for recreational mathematics programs. The authors modeled their proof of concept on a project conducted by choreographer Eliot Feld. Feld identified three basic abilities that were essential for success as a dancer and conducted 10-min auditions based on those abilities in third-grade elementary school classes in New York City to search for untapped dance talent. Using a parallel approach, a literature review led the authors to propose a four-item interview/audition for use with third to fifth graders designed to identify and recruit children into afterschool mathematics clubs or circles. The article goes on to describe the proposed abilities and instrument.
David Dai makes a compelling argument for talent development as the path forward for gifted education. In the process, he unveils his evolving complexity theory (ECT) with its special focus on the roles played by nature and nurture. The major components of Dai’s ECT are domain, person, development, and culture. Dai describes each component and then provides an analysis of how the components interact to facilitate high performance and creative productivity. One challenge faced by all the authors of the special issue is how to translate theoretical frameworks into practical applications in policy environments characterized by perpetual change. Dai thus closes his article with consideration of the implications of ECT for practice and research.
In their article “Systemic Gifted Education: A Theoretical Introduction,” Albert Ziegler and Heidrun Stoeger introduce systemic thinking – an approach that has gained in popularity in developmental and learning sciences – to the field of giftedness and talent development. The authors define a system and introduce basic concepts of systems theory before they present the actiotope model of giftedness (AMG), a systemic model for research and practice in gifted education and talent development. After elaborating upon the implications of systems approaches for gifted education, the authors discuss how their approach complements – rather than replaces – current conceptions of gifted education and talent development. They then review the ways in which systemic thinking can make a valuable contribution to gifted education, and argue for combining systemic thinking with other empirically testable theories.
Cluster 2: Talent development and societal participation
A second cluster focused on talent development and societal participation. In his article, Peter Csermely presents a framework on creativity as a “network phenomenon of both human conceptual and social networks,” arguing that most creative breakthroughs occur because of social connections between individuals who bridge diverse domains of knowledge and cultures. From this perspective, optimal talent development (a) requires the support of social networks exposing talented individuals to new situations and different social circles, (b) facilitates the novelty seeking that fuels creativity, and (c) increases the likelihood of engagement with collaborators on major social issues. Csermely provides three examples of implementing the network concept of creativity to support talented youngsters in Hungary.
Paula Olszewski-Kubilius and Saiying Steenbergen-Hu present a case study of a talent-development program designed to prepare lower income minority students to qualify for placement in honors-level science and advanced math courses in grade 9 by intervening with supplemental, outside-of-school programming during grades 3–8. They use the example of Project Excite to illustrate a new approach to educational-intervention research called practice-embedded educational research (PEER). In the PEER approach, researchers work collaboratively with schools to study an intervention systemically, treating variations in implementation not as factors to control but as opportunities through which to learn how best to implement or improve an intervention within a particular, real-life setting.
Jonathan Plucker, Matthew Makel, Michael Matthews, Scott Peters, and Karen Rambo-Hernandez discuss the distinctions and connections between policy, advocacy, and intervention and review the current state of the policy research within the field of gifted education. While there are some significant studies in this area, the authors note that policy research in gifted education is generally still quite limited. Plucker and colleagues identify six key areas for future policy research: the outcomes of policy changes for high-ability students; incorporating policy considerations into models and theories of talent development; comparing policies and their effects across states and countries; the effects of specific policies; reassessing policies about grouping and other accepted instructional and organizational strategies; and the processes of policy implementation.
Cluster 3: Designing the learning context for talent development in school
In her article, Nancy B. Hertzog explores learning contexts for talent development in public schools. She discusses various environmental aspects that influence talent development, among them physical space, affective elements, and teachers’ beliefs and their influence on instructional design. Hertzog concludes her article with suggestions for “extreme classroom makeovers” to the end of creating classroom environments optimally designed to foster students’ strengths and talents.
Within the framework of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, Scott Peters, Karen Rambo-Hernandez, Matthew Makel, Michael Matthews, and Jonathan Plucker analyze student achievement data from several different tests across multiple states in the United States. Their results showed that between 20 and 49% of elementary and middle-school students scored above grade level on language arts and 14–37% in mathematics. These data vividly illustrate the tremendous variability in achievement among students at the same grade level and call for wider use of acceleration strategies.
Cluster 4: Talent development outside of school
Cluster 4 focuses on talented children and youth outside of school. In their article, Heidrun Stoeger, Manuel Hopp, and Albert Ziegler introduce CyberMentor, a Germany-wide extracurricular, online program in STEM. The participants (females from high-achiever-track secondary schools in Germany) work for at least one year with a personal mentor with whom they discuss STEM topics and work on projects in STEM. After having employed a one-on-one mentoring approach during its first six years of operation, the program then shifted to a group-mentoring approach in which two mentoring dyads cooperated with one another while maintaining all other aspects of program implementation. Stoeger et al. compared the effectiveness of the two mentoring approaches and demonstrated that students who participated in the group-mentoring approach communicated more about STEM, had larger STEM networks with a more central position within these networks, and reported higher levels of elective intentions to study a STEM subject at university later on.
Susan Assouline, Lori Ihrig, and Duhita Mahatmya discuss the effectiveness of a broadened identification process for generating an inclusive talent pool of high-achieving rural middle-school students. Using above-average scores (85th percentile or higher) on a grade-level test resulted in a talent pool from which a cohort of high-potential students ready for talent-development opportunities in STEM was identified. The project investigators observed significant improvement for all talent-pool participants and concluded that talent-development opportunities, including taking an above-level test, have a positive impact on high-achieving students, including students who are not typically identified for gifted education or talent-search programs. Not surprisingly, there was greater growth for students who participated in the extracurricular program, especially in the area of math, with boys outperforming girls.
Part II: Articles appearing in High Ability Studies (volume 28)
Cluster 5: Outcomes of gifted education and talent development
Betsy McCoach, Hui Hui Yu, Allen Gottfried, and Adele Gottfried considered data from the Fullerton Longitudinal Study to explore the interaction between cognitive ability and achievement over time. The Fullerton study included data from 13 cognitive tests taken by participants between birth and age 17, as well as the results of 22 achievement tests administered to the same population between 7 and 17 years. After analyzing the participants’ outcomes, McCoach and her colleagues concluded that if the goal of talent development is for students to acquire long-term academic benefits, it is a better investment to base educational interventions (offering academically challenging knowledge and skills) on students’ previous achievement rather than tests of their cognitive abilities.
Cluster 6: Psychosocial factors of talent development
In his article, Moshe Zeidner introduces his readers to the complex research surrounding the broad topic of emotional intelligence (EI). Zeidner’s comprehensive analysis provides an impetus for the establishment of general principles and guidelines for developing training programs that aim to nurture the emotional intelligence of gifted students. Zeidner argues that individual students as well as schools can benefit from such training. However, he cautions that there should be careful consideration of training programs prior to their implementation to ensure that programs address the actual needs of the gifted they seek to serve. Furthermore, he points out that many of the programs that together make up gifted education are only one-day interventions and explains why short-term interventions may not be capable of effecting significant change and improvement for the individual student or school system.
Tracy Cross and Jennifer Cross highlight the importance of internal dynamics of the individual with regard to the fulfillment of talent. The authors reflect on the mental traps that can ensnare students, impeding their progress and sabotaging their motivation and effort. Cross and Cross describe a method of providing psychosocial supports grounded in the theories of Erik Erickson – leading from crisis to sensing hope, competence, and purpose in the process of transitioning from one developmental stage to the next.
The article by Del Siegle, Betsy McCoach, and Anne Roberts, “Why I Believe I Achieve Determines Whether I Achieve,” introduces a refined achievement orientation model (AOM), rounding out the cluster on psychosocial factors. The refined AOM includes various enhancements. It clarifies the multiplicative nature of an individual’s self-perception of self-efficacy, goal valuation, and environmental perceptions. These three areas require positive affect, although not necessarily in equal amounts in all three areas. Added to this model is also the self-regulation of metacognitive processes.
Cluster 7: Adaptive and maladaptive learning processes in talent development
The article authored by Megan Nicpon-Foley, Susan Assouline, Martin Kivlighan, Staci Fosenburg, Charles Cederberg, and Michelle Nanji, which sums up the theme of this cluster, presents a study of the effects of social and talent-development interventions for high-ability youth with social-skills deficits. Intervention studies in the area of twice-exceptionality are relatively rare; therefore, findings from this investigation offer crucial new information to educators and psychologists. The investigators found that high-ability students who also had social-skills deficits benefitted from the dual experience of a two-week talent-development program coupled with daily group meetings in which a video-modeling intervention addressing their social-skills deficits was implemented. The authors conclude that their results provide support for the recommendation of Subotnik, Olszewski-Kubilius, and Worrell (2011) that psychosocial skill acquisition – whether or not students have a social-skills impairment – should take place within a talent-development framework.
Cluster 8: High achievement and performance in talent development
This final thematic cluster explores high achievement, high performance, and creative productivity in different talent domains. In his article, “Learning to See by Learning to Draw,” Aaron Kozbelt explores the relationship between high levels of drawing skill, on the one hand, and visual perception and attention, on the other. Kozbelt offers a comprehensive review of the psychological research associated with artistic skill, placing particular emphasis on visual perception and attention as it relates to drawing. He concludes his review with the central assertion that the nature of artists’ expertise in their talent domain is rooted in perceptual processes such as attentional flexibility and perceptual advantages associated with understanding the structure of objects.
Roza Leikin, Mark Leikin, Nurit Paz-Baruch, Ilana Waisman, and Miri Lev identified specific characteristics of mathematically gifted students in three interconnected areas: basic cognitive traits, neuro-cognitive characteristics, and mathematical creativity. The authors conducted a multidisciplinary comparison of three groups of secondary school students who exhibited mathematical expertise: students not identified as generally gifted, generally gifted students, and students who had demonstrated superior performance in mathematics. Students with superior performance in mathematics attained better scores than generally gifted students in most of the tasks, while generally gifted students outperformed students not identified as generally gifted. The authors were also able to identify different profiles of characteristics for students who had demonstrated superior performance in mathematics.
Jonathan Wai and Heiner Rindermann looked at the relationship between high general ability and occupational achievement through multiple US samples that included federal judges, members of the United States Congress, millionaires and billionaires, business leaders, and elite journalists. About 50% of these individuals were in the top 1% of ability indicators, which reflects a proportion that is 50 times greater than what would be expected. However, this percentage varied by group, with US Congressional Representatives having the lowest percentage. Wai asserts that these results demonstrate that ability matters in terms of reaching the pinnacle of any occupational or educational domain; however, there is no ability threshold in terms of adult achievement. The authors note the striking influence of Harvard and other selective institutions in providing institutional path effects that include supportive social networks and opportunities. They conclude with several advocacy and policy recommendations intended to help level the playing field for disadvantaged youths, including a greater focus on financially disadvantage gifted students and the spatially talented.
The final manuscript in the Gifted Child Quarterly special issue, by Rena Subotnik, Heidrun Stoeger, and Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, summarizes some of the highlighted outcomes of the inaugural summit. Participants were excited by the exposure to ideas and methods of their colleagues from abroad, and committed themselves to taking better note of scholars in other countries in their future reading and networking. The focus of the summit was talent development and included discussion of the differences between taking a talent-development approach and more traditional mechanisms for selecting and serving gifted children and youth. Through their papers and discussions, participants identified components of talent development and implications for policy and advocacy in need of further exploration and development to the end of ever advancing the paradigms that undergird our shared field of scientific and humanistic endeavor.
Professor, Chair for School Research, School Development, and Evaluation, University of Regensburg, Germany
[email protected]
Paula Olszewski-Kubilius
Professor, Education and Social Policy, Director, Center for Talent Development, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Rena F. Subotnik
Professor, Education Directorate, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, USA
Susan Assouline
Professor and Director, Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, College of Education, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
D. Betsy McCoach
Professor and Program Chair, Measurement, Evaluation, and Assessment, Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
Albert Ziegler
Professor, Chair for Educational Psychology and Research on Excellence, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany