Su búsqueda

This article presents a pentagonal implicit theory of giftedness and a set of data testing the theory. The exposition is divided into five parts. First, we discuss what an implicit theory is and why such theories are important. Second, we describe the pentagonal theory, specifying five conditions claimed to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient for a person to be labeled as gifted. These conditions help us understand not only why some people are labeled as gifted but also why some others are not. Third, we consider the relation of the pentagonal theory to explicit theories of giftedness. Fourth, we present data supporting the theory. Finally, we discuss some implications of the pentagonal theory for gifted education. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

This reprinted article originally appeared in Gifted Child Quarterly, 37(4), 155-160. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1994-19557-001.) Compared a national sample of gifted underachievers and gifted high achievers on a number of characteristics. Giftedness was measured as a composite score at or above the 95th percentile on the ACT. Underachievement was defined as reporting a high school GPA of <=2.25 (on a 4.00 scale), and high achievement was defined as reporting a GPA of >=3.75 (on a 4.00 scale). Ss were 30,604 high school juniors and seniors: 257 gifted underachievers and 30,347 gifted high achievers. The underachievers generally had lower scores on the ACT and less extensive out-of-class accomplishments. Over 90% of the underachievers were Caucasian males. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

The seminal articles from Gifted Child Quarterly in this volume address this issue of what giftedness is. They thereby inform our efforts to do research on giftedness and to identify children as gifted. What are some of the major issues raised in these articles, and what are examples of some ideas proposed to address each of these issues? What is the nature of giftedness and talent? One can learn more about the nature of giftedness through viewing responses to enrichment activities than through conventional tests(Passow, 1981). Giftedness involves excellence, rarity, productivity, demonstrability, and value attached to the skills/products of the individual (Sternberg & Zhang, 1995). How should we study giftedness? We need more to use the techniques of mainstream psychological research to study giftedness (Jackson, 1993). Should we expand conventional notions of giftedness, and if so, how should we do so? Metacognition is crucial to giftedness (Shore & Dover, 1987). Creativity is an important facet of giftedness (Runco, 1993). Wisdom is an important kind of giftedness (Sternberg, 2000). How, if at all, are giftedness and talent different? Giftedness refers to domains of human abilities, talents, to domains of human accomplishments (Gagne, 1985). Are there different profiles of giftedness and talent, and if so, what are they? Six profiles of giftedness and talent are successful, challenging, underground, dropouts, double-labeled, and autonomous (Betts & Neihart, 1988). Different kinds of gifted individuals (e.g., statesmen versus religious leaders) develop through different profiles of strengths and weaknesses (Walberg, Tsai, Weinstein, Gabriel, Rasher, Rosecrans, Rovai, Ide, Trujillo, & Vukosavich, 1981). How do giftedness and talent develop? They develop in part through certain kinds of overexcitabilities, namely, psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, and emotional (Piechowski & Colangelo, 1984). Prodigies develop in a way that is different from that of most gifted individuals in part as a function of opportunities made available to them in their environments (Feldman, 1993). Giftedness can be understood in part in terms of the interaction of the organism and the environment, which produces diverse developmental outcomes (Horowitz, 1987). How valid are available assessments of giftedness and talent? Measures of multiple intelligences appear, in general, to be reliable but not particularly valid (Plucker, Callahan, & Tomchin, 1996). It would, of course, be delightful if a consensus could be found on all or even many of these issues, but consensus is hard to find. Nevertheless, there appear to be at least several points of broad agreement. Giftedness involves more than just high IQ. Giftedness has noncognitive (e.g., motivationally driven) components as well as cognitive ones. Environment is crucial in terms of whether potentials for gifted performance will be realized. Giftedness is not a single thing: There are multiple forms of giftedness. Hence, one-size-fits-all assessments or programs are likely to be too narrow. Measures for identifying or evaluating gifted individuals need to be proposed to operationalize theories, and then they need to be evaluated rather than merely being assumed to be valid. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: introduction)

In comparison to most research approaches and theoretical traditions in other fields of psychology, educational-psychological approaches to these concepts have been related more closely to practice in a wide variety of educational settings in and out of schools. For example, topics of research in the areas of motivation and cognition have been concerned with learning and achievement, and the language used has tended to be familiar to educators and teachers. Educational psychologists integrated new concepts and methods from other fields of psychology into their research as a way to more fully address issues of practice. Thus, when psychometric approaches relying on quantitative measures became dominant in the area of intelligence research, many investigators in the field of educational psychology began to conceptualize and measure variables using psychometric approaches. Statistical tools were adopted to measure talent (giftedness), as well as cognitive factors based on traditional intelligence tests. As a consequence, research efforts focused on interindividual differences. This line of research however, did not address intraindividual development, nor information about the relations between the variables under consideration (Krapp, 1999; Medved, Midi, & Ainley, 2002; Murphy & Alexander, 2000). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

This book is intended to answer questions of parents whose children may need psychological testing. It begins with deciding whether the child needs testing, what to do if they need testing--including finding a competent professional to administer the test, and the benefits and costs of having a child tested within or outside of the school system. It also covers when it is appropriate to seek a second opinion. The book then covers commonly used tests. The authors briefly describe the tests, so the reader can know how the tests used for a child will help the clinician determine the child's strengths and weaknesses and also so that they may participate in decisions about which tests are appropriate. Tests covered include intelligence, achievement, and neuropsychological tests, as well as tests of emotional functioning. The book then covers how to read and interpret test reports, including definitions of commonly used terms. The last part of the book describes the most common disorders for which a child would undergo testing, so that parents can understand why a particular diagnosis was appropriate and a different diagnosis was inappropriate. It also provides information on appropriate treatment strategies for each disorder, as well as resources for parents and children. Throughout the book, the authors provide reassurance and further options for support to the reader. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: introduction)

Dr. Moss's book addresses the diverse situations that the teacher may encounter. She addresses everything from learning disabilities, to a child dealing with trauma, to working with the gifted student. This book will facilitate the teacher's ability to consider the individual needs and strengths of atypical children, to improve the input given to the team of educational specialists who will help develop an educational program specific to each child, where indicated, and to make the primary observations and refer, if necessary, to psychologically and medically trained professionals who are best able to help these children with their psychological and medical needs. This book is written in clear and concise language that is easily understood by those who do not have a complete education in psychology, psychiatry, or neurology. This book offers a necessary contribution to all current teachers and those planning to enter the profession. It is especially important in this twenty-first century, when so many more responsibilities for the child's welfare fall to our teachers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: foreword)

This chapter provides a historical background on counseling for the gifted, including defining giftedness and the identification of gifted students. Other areas addressed are differential needs, family issues, counseling for gifted students, and special concerns. Programs and services can be developed, but none can or will address all the myriad aspects of the life and times of students with exceptional gifts. In the end, the attitude of significant others will bridge the gap in determining the quality and impact of any intervention with gifted students. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

The focus of this chapter is to explore the affective states and needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) gifted adolescents during the acquisition of a second language and second culture. While many new immigrants arrive with some knowledge of the English language, most are unable to compete on an equal footing with their English-speaking peers in the secondary or postsecondary educational environment because of a lack of academic literacy. There is no unitary description that may address their cultural backgrounds. An English language learner (ELL) may have arrived after a childhood wholly lived in one foreign country or, instead, may be a member of an increasingly significant group of global nomads, children who have lived in multiple countries. An ELL, too, may be a member of an indigenous culture whose life has been lived within U.S. borders, but who shares many characteristics with the foreign-born. Within this group of culturally and linguistically different adolescents, it is expected that the occurrence of giftedness in the population should parallel the membership of giftedness in the majority native-speaking culture. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

This book offers the most extensive look available at how gifted education can rise to encourage a more diverse student population and become enriched by the diversity of those children. This book looks specifically at diversity in gifted education as it relates to race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Topics include the identification of giftedness among an increasingly diverse population of students; specific service modifications to address diversity; improved counseling and guidance; and specific curricular and pedagogical methods for supporting the success of every gifted child. This is not like the usual book or textbook about gifted and talented boys and girls. All of its authors are specialists on the topic for which we invited them to submit one of the chapters. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: book)

This chapter begins with a discussion of the stereotype of giftedness of children of Indian origin. The main reason is, of course, the talents and hard work of the students themselves. Nothing in this chapter should be interpreted as taking away from the accomplishments of the students. However, the essence of the belief systems of parents of Indian origin is that their children can and will succeed and that no sacrifice on the part of the parents or the children is too great. These parents impart to their children a culture of hard work, clear focus, building strong credentials, and a single-minded pursuit of careers that lead to prestige and material rewards and recognition. No discussion of the "giftedness" of Indian children and the pressures on them can be complete without recognition of the role of their parents. A more complete understanding of the pressures on children of Indian origin in U.S. schools today requires an understanding of their parents and the culture in which they grew up. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: create)

This chapter addresses the underrepresentation of certain non-Asian racial-ethnic minorities in gifted education programs. One possible explanation for the racial imbalance in gifted education is that the ways giftedness is defined and identified are biased in favor of Whites and Asians. A second possible explanation is that giftedness is not, in fact, distributed equally across all demographic groups. This chapter examines these two theories. The tradeoff between racial balance and rigor in intellectual standards has led educators of the gifted to consider evaluating participants' strengths against other, less cognitive standards. The aim is to "desegregate" gifted education by "democratizing" it, in particular, by expanding the range of skills, abilities, and achievements counted as gifts and the variety of people enlisted to identify them. By enrolling students with many different and vaguely defined kinds of personal strengths, but often weaker academic ones, educators cannot differentiate the curriculum to suit the needs of remarkably talented students of any sort. Narrowing the current large racial gaps in academic achievement is an important social goal, one that often dominates American political discourse and drives social policy. But, these gaps are precisely the reason why "racial equity" cannot be attained in gifted education at this time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: create)

The data from our diverse sources, the normally developing gifted, as well as ordinary children, and the findings on the autistic savants support a developmental analysis in terms of an orderly sequence in the acquisition of graphic skills, especially in the early years. We also note the powerful impact of the culture on the young artist's style and infer that these children acquired the pictorial skills valued in their culture by consistently exploring the possibilities and constraints of their medium and by discovering the major rules that underlie their chosen art form. As my review has indicated, the rate of acquisition of mature representational skills was greatly enhanced in the talented children; but, beyond their precocity, their artistic achievements also differed qualitatively from that of their ordinary agemates. To what extent does prodigy status or childhood giftedness in the visual arts predict the pursuit of a career in the arts? To pursue a career in the arts requires cultural supports and at least some financial rewards. Personality factors also play a significant role. The finding that childhood giftedness is not a good predictor of adult career choices need not detract from our appreciation of artistically gifted children's talents and the roles they can play in their lives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

This chapter explores empowering and serving Hispanic students in gifted education, their curricular and instructional needs, and methods for balancing their home, school, and community worlds. Assessment alternatives for determining mastery of skills and content are also provided. This chapter is written with the understanding that the changing demographics of the United States is readily seen in its public schools, and this diversity permeates every school-based program that exists, with the exception, perhaps, of gifted education. Programs including gifted Hispanic students should be designed to nurture individual giftedness and provide a classroom climate that encourages them to use their talents in productive ways. Identifying, recruiting, and retaining Hispanic students in gifted education can provide them with a brighter future and increase their opportunity for securing a postsecondary education. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

Giftedness in the narrow sense refers to a high level of general mental ability, or psychometric g. The present article pertains only to giftedness in this narrow sense, i.e., high g. Schools typically consider as gifted those pupils who score more than two standard deviations above the population mean of children their own age on certain mental tests. This is equivalent to an IQ of 130 or above, a cutoff score that includes approximately the top-scoring 2-3% of the population. Any particular IQ cutoff, however, is not essentially important for this discussion. An arbitrary point on an age-standardized and normalized ordinal scale that roughly estimates psychometric g theoretically has the same statistical and predictive properties throughout its entire range. Empirical evidence, so far, has not contradicted this theoretical conjecture. Individuals classified as gifted in the narrow sense are not uniquely different from the rest of the population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

This chapter is designed to provide an overview of gender differences found among intellectually gifted students and examine the research addressing males and females in a variety of dimensions of cognitive giftedness, but most frequently those related to manifesting quantitative gifts. This is often a controversial topic. Gender-related differences, when clearly shown by researchers, are not always embraced with enthusiasm. Men and women differ from each other in both fundamental and superficial ways. Physiological differences are well-known. Other differences are less obvious. Many of the cognitive ones are small and unimportant. A few are larger and influential, especially educationally. In this chapter, only differences on certain aptitude and achievement tests are considered, chiefly for above-average examinees. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

This chapter focuses on the cognitive components of giftedness in mathematics as postulated in Milgram's multidimensional 4x4 model of the structure of giftedness. The challenge was to develop operational definitions of domain-specific creative ability in mathematics, to assess them reliably, and to investigate their relationship to general creative thinking ability. In addition, the authors investigated the interrelationships between general and specific creative ability in mathematics and general and specific academic ability in mathematics. This required the development of two new instruments to assess domain-specific creativity in mathematics: the Multiscale Academic and Creative Abilities in Mathematics and the Tel Aviv Activities and Accomplishments Inventory: Mathematics. The authors developed two mapping sentences to provide an exact and detailed conceptual description of the postulated academic and creative abilities in mathematics at four levels of understanding. They used the two mapping sentences to guide the process of building the items to assess specific academic and specific creative thinking abilities in mathematics, respectively. In addition, a precise scoring guide was developed to operationally define differences in academic and creative abilities in mathematics between and within four ability levels. The between-level measurement refers to four qualitatively distinct levels of cognitive process ordered by level of difficulty based on an ordinal scale. The within-level measurement refers to eight qualitatively distinct levels of cognitive processes, ordered by degree of complexity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

This book is about some relationships that might exist between psychological type, talent and disease that, for reasons about to be discussed, may follow an oddly circular model of cognitive development in the brain, roughly analogous to the movement of light around a sundial. The relationships have not been proven conclusively in most instances, are inductively reasoned from a variety of old and new perspectives, and are highly uncertain at best, as these connections are only recently being explored by the psychological type community. Nevertheless, there are valid purposes to such a preliminary attempt, which are namely to enhance our limited understanding of the role of cognition in disease processes, and to create a researchable model of psychological type, talent and health that has heretofore been lacking in the typological literature. It is hoped that by first examining pathological patterns that may or may not be present in the different types and talents, we might better understand the conscious conditions for health in each of these various categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: introduction) Sundial is an interdisciplinary work about cognition and health that encompasses the disciplines of psychology, medicine/complementary healthcare, and spirituality. It considers possible connections between type and disease--and does so in a way that appeals to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® practitioner and popular interest in such complementary therapies as chakra stimulation, Chinese medicine, and Therapeutic Touch. Sundial is set up like the history of contemporary Western medicine and psychology, moving from a sequentially ordered, science-based, analytical dissection of the ills of the body and mind to a more holistic, integrative approach to the whole of the person (mind, body, heart, and soul). Sundial makes the case that cognition and behavior associated with psychological type may be related to certain kinds of disease, but may also provide clues to disease prevention and health management. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: cover)

The purpose of the second edition of this book is to provide a comprehensive conceptual and practical overview of current theories of intelligence and measures of cognitive ability. This text summarizes the latest research in the field of intellectual assessment and includes comprehensive treatment of critical issues that should be considered when the use of intelligence tests is warranted. The three primary objectives of this book are as follows: (1) to present in-depth descriptions of prominent theories of intelligence, tests of cognitive abilities, and issues related to the use of intelligence tests with special populations; (2) to provide important information about the validity of contemporary intelligence tests; and (3) to demonstrate the utility of a well-validated theoretical foundation for developing intelligence tests and interpretive approaches, and for guiding research and practice. The ultimate goal of this book is to provide professionals with the knowledge necessary to use the latest intelligence batteries effectively. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: preface)

This chapter begins by providing a brief historical overview of giftedness, with an emphasis on identifying the major figures in the field. The theoretical formulation of intelligence and the conceptual links between intelligence and giftedness are also discussed from a historical perspective. The evolution of multitrait theories of intelligence, the impact of advances in psychometrics on gifted assessment, and the increase in the number of theory-based cognitive measures are examined. A major portion of the chapter focuses on discussing special issues related to the intellectual assessment of gifted children. The importance of considering the theoretical differences among intelligence measures, and the importance of using theory-based measures, are discussed. The chapter concludes with specific recommendations on the effective use of intelligence measures in the identification of giftedness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

This chapter looks at the Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent (DMGT) as a developmental model of giftedness and talent. Along with giftedness and talent, the DMGT introduces four components (see Figure 7.1) that help represent more accurately the complexity of the talent development process: intrapersonal catalysts (1C), environmental catalysts (EC), learning and practicing (LP), and chance (C). Moreover, as stated in the formal definitions previously mentioned, precise thresholds quantify the meaning of "outstanding." Finally, the DMGT discusses the long-term process of talent development, proposing various dynamic interactions among the six components. The present overview is structured around the three themes previously identified: (a) the six components, (b) the prevalence issue, and (c) the dynamics of talent development. In the final section, the author briefly highlight the main differences between the DMGT and other well-known conceptions of giftedness. The second part of this chapter succinctly covers two major questions (see Gagné, 2003b, for an extended discussion). First, what relationships do the six components of the DMGT entertain among themselves? Second, is it possible to create a hierarchy of the five factors in terms of their relative causal power? In other words, where lies the difference between those who become talented and those who do not? (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: create)