Blending Research-Based Practices and Practice-Embedded Research: Project Excite Closes Achievement and Excellence Gaps for Underrepresented Gifted Minority Students

Abstract

In this article, we advocate for a new movement in education, particularly an approach emphasizing blending research-based practice with practice-embedded research. We do so by describing and discussing Project Excite, a working example that demonstrates such a model in the context of gifted education. We first trace the history, the impetus, and key design elements of Project Excite, a front-loading intervention aiming to develop the potential of underrepresented students for advanced science, technology, engineering, and mathematics learning from early grades. We review a line of past research and key findings on Project Excite over its 14-year journey. We then discuss the implication of Project Excite for gifted programming in gifted education. Last, we pinpoint some questions to inspire future research and practice.

Keywords

achievement gap minority students front-loading strategy research-based practice practice-embedded research

Educational progress is mostly likely to emerge from approaches to research that create an equal footing for practitioners and researchers, recognizing that though these groups accumulate and curate knowledge in different ways, they both have a role in creating tools (curricula, practices, professional development approaches) that can be used to forge lasting improvements.

—Catherine E. Snow

Blending Practice and Research: A New Movement in Education

The quote above conveys one of the central ideas that Catherine Snow emphasized in her 2014 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture—Rigor and Realism: Doing Educational Science in the Real World, which later appeared as a featured article in Education Researcher (Snow, 2015). In this article, Snow underscored that education inquiry has been shifting toward practice-embedded educational research (PEER) over the past dozen years; an approach that emphasizes the interconnections of research and practice. PEER refers to a framework consisting of a set of principles initially articulated in the Strategic Education Research Partnership (i.e., the SERP Report), one of a series of projects initiated and supported by the National Academies beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Donovan, Wigdor, & Snow, 2003; National Research Council, 1999). The SERP envisioned designing an educational research enterprise that would make respectable contributions to educational improvement in the real world through close connections between research and practice.

PEER involves a “structured, supported, and sustained research partnership” (Snow, 2015, p. 461) between researchers, practitioners, and schools. The partnership is focused on an “urgent problem of practice” or a pressing concern of educators, which is the impetus for the collaboration. Deviations from an intervention model are not viewed as problematic or something to be rigorously controlled, but as aspects of the intervention to be studied, informing and improving the intervention—a source of data to inform the ongoing work. As Snow (2015) states, “the practice-inspired approach treats variation in implementation not as a mediating variable but as a crucial source of information” (p. 461). From this perspective, researchers study not only the intervention or innovation but also the way it is systemically implemented. They assess how it affects not only students and teachers but also stakeholders at the school and the district level and within local communities.

Researchers and educators whose primary concerns lie with the practical outcomes of education and the performance of the nation’s educational system as a whole have long been advocating for bringing together practitioners, educators, and researchers to develop and ensure reliable improvement in complicated and ever-changing educational systems through practice-based research (Bryk, 2015). Researchers and educators in gifted education have also found themselves facing the paradox of practice and research. In a hypothetical case, researchers might take great pride in finding, through a randomized controlled trial rigorously implemented in a suburban school, that grouping third graders by their initial achievement levels or learning aptitudes in a math course for 1 year improves all students’ end-of-year course grades by 20%. However, a teacher who is excited by such a finding and strives to apply a grouping strategy to his own class may find his plan a “mission impossible” after a few weeks of trial, due to the complexity of his class composition and unexpected administrative obstacles. Without research that informs practitioners on how a practice works within an educational system, efforts to use it will be thwarted.

How can we overcome such a paradox to better serve gifted and talent students and move the field of gifted education forward? In this article, we call for embracing an approach that blends research-based practice with the PEER framework. We do so through presenting and discussing a program called Project Excite, a working example that demonstrates how to blend research-based practice and practice-embedded research in the context of gifted education.

Project Excite

Research Behind Project Excite

Project Excite was conceived to address a significant achievement and excellence gap within a local K-8 district and a high school, which illustrates a national educational issue that has been well-documented by research and has dominated education policy in the United States for over a decade. Results of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress program showed: Black–White achievement gaps of 26 points and Hispanic–White gaps of 24 and 21 points at Grades 4 and 8, respectively in reading, as well as Black–White gaps of 24 and 32 points, and Hispanic–White gaps of 18 and 22 points at Grades 4 and 8, respectively, in math (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2015).

A considerable amount of research indicates that achievement gaps begin early (even before school entrance) and widen through the school years. For example, it was found that at 4 years, 37% of White students were proficient in letter recognition compared with 28% of Black and 23% of Hispanic children, while in number and shape recognition, 73% of White students were proficient compared with 55% of Black students and 52% of Hispanic students (U.S. Department of Education, 2000). Large gaps also exist in scientific knowledge at kindergarten between lower and higher socioeconomic status (SES) students and these gaps persist through elementary school (Morgan, Farkas, Hillemeier, & Maczuga, 2016).

Furthermore, there is evidence for the existence of large excellence gaps at top levels of achievement for low-income children, second language learners, and minority students, despite the fact that much of the discussion on achievement gaps in the United States has focused on minimum levels of competency. These gaps are present early, continue to grow between Grades 3 and 8, and are widening (Plucker, Burroughs, & Song, 2008; Plucker, Hardesty, & Burroughs, 2013). For students who begin school with higher skill levels (i.e., higher achieving students) gaps between minority and nonminority students have been found to increase at a faster rate between kindergarten and Grade 5 in both reading and math (Reardon, 2008).

Also, research shows that unequal opportunities in access to outside-of-school learning experiences, such as summer academic programs, play a role in achievement and excellence gaps. About two thirds of the achievement gaps between lower and higher income students in Grade 9 can be attributed to disparities in summer learning opportunities (National Summer Learning Association, n.d.). Analyzing data from four national longitudinal surveys of U.S. high school students, Snellman, Silva, Frederick, and Putnam (2015) found evidence of a growing activity engagement gap in extracurricular activities between higher and lower income youth. Additionally, gaps in informal learning opportunities about the natural world contribute to early disparities in science achievement between higher and lower income children (Morgan et al., 2016).

An Organic Beginning of Project Excite

A Multifaceted Impetus

In 1999, several teachers from Evanston Township High School (ETHS), the high school that serves the geographic area surrounding Northwestern University, approached the first author, the director of the Center for Talent Development (CTD) at Northwestern University, with a proposal. These teachers were hired by CTD to teach accelerated math and science courses to gifted students participating in summer and weekend programs in CTD. They were concerned that even though the student population at ETHS was quite diverse, there was very little diversity in their advanced- and honors-level science and math classes at the high school. For example, in the 2015-2016 school year, 48% of the students in ETHS were Black or Latino, and 43% were White; the enrollment profiles of these three ethnicities have largely remained static in the past decade (ETHS, 2017). However, the number of White students in the advanced courses and programs were often three times more than that of Black and Latino students in ETHS at the time. The leadership of CTD was similarly concerned about the lack of diversity among their program participants.

The Stakeholders

The initial planning and design team of Project Excite included the leadership of CTD and the School of Education and Social Policy of Northwestern University, ETHS, and the local K-8 school district. All partners had a stake in this mutual effort. The K-8 district was interested in having more minority students enter and succeed in their advanced and accelerated track in mathematics (e.g., completing Algebra 1 before Grade 9). Teachers at ETHS were interested in seeing more students of color being placed in the accelerated or above grade-level math and/or science tracks, such as taking Algebra 2, Algebra 2 Honors, and Geometry Honors in Grade 9. Northwestern University and CTD were interested in supporting Evanston families and the local community, particularly in serving disadvantaged high-potential gifted minorities, diversifying the student population participating in CTD supplemental weekend and summer programs, and closing the achievement and excellence gap. To fulfill these shared visions with these partners, CTD launched Project Excite in 2000.

Project Goals

Given the underrepresentation of minority students, specifically African American and Hispanic students at higher achievement levels and advanced classes in high school level and the priorities of the school district leaders to close these particular achievement gaps, Project Excite was designed to support and enhance minority students’ performance in math and science through extensive outside-of-school supplemental learning. Its ultimate goals were to serve underrepresented high-potential minority students, especially those from a disadvantaged background, more effectively by preparing them for advanced science, technology, engineering, and mathematics learning in high school, to reduce the achievement gap between minority and nonminority students, and to increase minority students’ representation in advanced and gifted programs.

Identification and Key Components of Project Excite

Identifying High-Potential Minority Students

Early Identification

In alignment with its aim to intervene early, Project Excite began with identifying high-potential minority third graders, early enough to allow sufficient opportunity and time to have a significant impact on student preparation for high school, but also to allow program administrators to feel confident that talent potential could be ascertained reliably with standardized testing. Evidence of academic achievement not demonstrated on tests, and family support (e.g., transportation to programs) for committed participation over a length of time were also important factors taken into consideration in selecting students.

Broad Inclusion

All students who self-identified as African American or Hispanic from the five schools involved in the project were invited to test for participation in Project Excite. Given that the research suggests that racial achievement gaps exist at all SES levels, we did not screen for family SES, although most of our students had low-to-moderate family incomes.

Incorporation of Multiple Identification Tools

Project Excite utilized multiple tools for identification and adjusted selection criteria to account for potential differences in opportunities to learn among lower income students. For example, it considered students’ performances on the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, criterion-reference tests such as the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT), and norm-reference assessments such as the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS). Considering the existence of achievement and excellence gaps in the K-8 district, Project Excite used a cutoff of the 75th percentile of such tests and looked for patterns of performance close to the cutoff across all measures. In many circumstances, supplemental information such as teacher and/or school recommendations regarding students’ academic performance, learning potentials, work habits, and interests were also considered. Through these multiple tools, Project Excite more inclusively identified disadvantaged high-potential minority students at an early age who otherwise might not have been targeted to receive additional services and resources to develop their potentials.

Key Program Components and Activities

Project Excite designed and implemented a continuum of programs and activities following a front-loading strategy, an approach that provides intensive interventions to raise the achievement of students who have great potential, but fall below gifted identification threshold so that they can qualify for advanced classes or gifted programming in the future (Briggs, Reis, & Sullivan, 2008; Olszewski-Kubilius & Clarenbach, 2012). Through Grades 3 to 8, a typical Project Excite student was required to participate in approximately 445 hours of learning, supplementing their regular schooling during after-school, weekends, and school breaks, plus 180 hours of optional learning activities. If a student’s average learning time is 5 hours during a normal school day, completing the required 445 hours in Project Excite was equivalent to almost 90 additional school days (445/5 = 89), not counting the 180 optional hours. Such an intensive supplemental intervention is a distinct feature of Project Excite among most programs in the nation designed to boost the achievement of low-income and culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse gifted students (Olszewski-Kubilius & Clarenbach, 2012).

Project Excite designed its curriculum and activities centering on the particular needs of students at their grade level and developmental stage. For instance, during the earliest stage of students’ participation in the project, the curriculum emphasized introducing third graders to science and math topics and “exciting” them about STEM through after-school classes taught by high school teachers at ETHS—a prestigious local high school that they would attend in the future. Examples of activities include extracting DNA from strawberries or performing experiments with pulleys and weights. To help students build solid math and literacy skills for a high level of academic progress in later grades, Project Excite offered both math and reading classes in the summer for third and fourth graders through CTD.

In general, Project Excite delivered curriculum and activities at a relatively lower dosage for younger grades and increased the dosage considerably by middle school. For example, the required hours were 15, 40, and 40 for Grades 3 to 5, and increased to 145, 80, and 125 for Grades 6 to 8, respectively. Students started with after-school classes while they were in lower grades and gradually moved to half-day weekend programs, half-day or full-day summer programs, 3-week all-day summer courses, and programs with residential components by the time they reached to eighth grade. Students often started with enrichment courses in math and reading and took advanced or accelerated courses later when they were ready.

Although all the courses and program activities took place outside of the students’ regular school day, they were designed to support and advance in-school learning. For example, the Saturday classes for Project Excite students in sixth grade focused on algebraic thinking to help them prepare for exams at the end of the school year that would determine their math placement in seventh grade. Some of the curricula were designed to fill in for gaps in the school curriculum, for example, providing significant science laboratory experience in Grades 7 and 8. Moreover, students in eighth grade attended a specially designed 4-week, all-day bridge program that consisted of instruction in math, focusing on ensuring that students attained a firm foundation for Geometry or Algebra 2 and science vocabulary as a foundation for freshman biology when entering ninth grade. The bridge program also served as an early introduction to the high school’s policies and procedures.

Support System

Recognizing the value of building a system to support students’ academic, psychological, and social–emotional development, Project Excite took concerted actions to connect with their families, teachers, schools, and communities (Olszewski-Kubilius, Lee, Ngoi, & Ngoi, 2004). For instance, it hosted regular parent meetings, workshops, and a family conference. It involved parents as volunteers to support or organize family gatherings, such as picnics and excursions to plays and museums. In the later years of the project, parents formed parent groups, ran events, and identified topics and speakers for parent workshops. Program administrators sought out extra help for students with learning disabilities and Spanish translators for families of second-language learners when needed. They also organized Northwestern University undergraduates and excelling high school students to tutor and mentor project students.

Furthermore, Project Excite built close partnerships with local schools and communities. For example, it identified liaisons at each partner school to facilitate logistics, such as getting students on the buses for transport to after-school Project Excite activities and sharing information about student progress within their school classes. It recruited teachers from both the K-8 and high school district to teach the after-school enrichment sessions and summer classes and encouraged junior and senior ETHS students to assist as leaders of small group work and teaching assistants. It maintained regular communication with principals of the five participating schools and the leadership teams of the two school districts.

Research and Evaluation

Evaluation Data

Project Excite exerted concerted efforts to track and assess students’ progress, academic achievement, feedback from the participants, parents and school personnel, and various issues concerning implementation and continual improvement of the project. It collected a wide spectrum of data since its inception, including the following: (a) scores from standardized achievement tests, such as the ISAT, Explore tests, and Measures of Academic Progress tests; (b) achievement and performance data from students’ respective regular schools, such as course grades, qualifications for prealgebra in Grade 6, and end-of-year teacher evaluation reports; (c) data particularly relevant to Project Excite, such as students’ retention rate, their performance on key project activities (e.g., enrichment and accelerated classes), and students’ perceptions of and attitudes toward their experience in the project; and (d) data after students exited the 6-year project such as their ninth-grade math placement and college placement after high school. Project Excite generated a series of publications based on these data. Below are four representative empirical studies conducted during 14 years of Project Excite following its launch in 2000.

Olszewski-Kubilius et al. (2004)

In this study, Olszewski-Kubilius et al. (2004) evaluated the efficacy of Project Excite 3 years after the project was launched. By then, the project consisted of a total of 70 participants in three cohorts (Cohorts 1-3), among which students of Cohort 1 had moved from Grade 3 to Grade 6 and those of Cohort 3 just entered the project as third graders. This study uncovered several positive outcomes: noteworthy was that 12 of the 19 sixth graders from Cohort 1 qualified for placement in prealgebra in 2003, leading to a 300% increase from the year before in the percentage of minority students qualifying for advanced math programs in the four schools where Cohort 1 students were enrolled.

Lee, Olszewski-Kubilius, and Peternel (2009)

In this study, the authors interviewed 14 rising ninth graders who succeeded in completing all 6 years of participation in Project Excite. They asked them about their experiences over the course of participation, perceptions of the project’s academic and social–emotional effects, and their feedback on some key components and activities of the project. They also listened to parents of these students narrating whether they revised their academic expectations of their child or attitudes toward math and science because of Project Excite, their involvement and support for their child’s education and learning activities, as well as parenting. Results showed that an important motivation for students to persist in and complete the 6-year project was their desire for opportunities to qualify for advanced and gifted programs, and to better prepare for high school. They found several noteworthy outcomes of the project, including the expansion of networks with other high-potential minority peers, growing support for aiming high, and increased confidence on competing with their peers academically. Meanwhile, students expressed some concerns on balancing academic work and connecting with their peers outside Project Excite.

Lee, Olszewski-Kubilius, and Peternel (2010)

Expanding their earlier qualitative inquiries, Lee et al. (2010) interviewed 30 students of Grades 4 through 9 who had been in Project Excite for 1 to 6 years, as well as 7 teachers of these students in their regular schools. The interviews inquired about students’ perceptions and experiences in taking accelerated math courses through Project Excite, readiness for acceleration, study skills, support from teachers and family members, peer relationships, and factors affecting the outcomes of accelerated experiences in math. They found that, overall, students viewed taking accelerated math courses as exciting, beneficial, and challenging and valued the opportunity of learning advanced math ahead of their peers.

Olszewski-Kubilius, Steenbergen-Hu, Thomson, and Rosen (2016)

In this recent research undertaking on Project Excite, Olszewski-Kubilius et al. (2016) analyzed a comprehensive set of achievement data accumulated along the program’s 14-year journey. The project served and/or was serving approximately 361 students from Cohorts 1 to 14 by 2013. Students of Cohort 1 graduated from high school in 2010 following 6-year supplemental learning through Project Excite while attending their regular schools through Grades 3 to 8 and those of Cohort 14 began a similar path in 2013. The authors compared Project Excite participants with students of two local school districts on their performances in math, science, reading, and English on three standardized achievement tests—ISAT, Explore test, and Measures of Academic Progress, as well as math placement status in ninth grade. They explored the trajectory of the achievement growth of Project Excite students during their 6-year participation in the project. They also reviewed the college matriculation information of Cohorts 1 to 5 students who had graduated from high school, examining whether students who exited Project Excite after eighth grade continued to excel through high school and subsequently launch a college career. Overall, 77% of students successfully completed the entire sequence of program activities from third to ninth grade. Of the students who discontinued at various time point, 10% did so because of family relocations. There was no pattern to the variety of reasons for other students discontinuing their participation in the project and less than 2% dropped out due to lack of interest or waning motivation.

This study revealed the following four key findings. First, Project Excite reduced the math and science achievement gap between disadvantaged high-potential minority and high-achieving majority (e.g., White and Asian) students. It successfully prepared them for placement in above-grade-level math and improved their representation and participation in advanced high school courses, particularly in ninth grade. Second, Project Excite students made larger achievement gains in science, reading, and math in comparison with other district students throughout their time in the project, although their performance was comparable to comparison peers when they entered the project in third grade (i.e., effect sizes ranging from 0.30 to 0.53 in math and from 0.21 to 0.51 in reading). Their performance on math and reading consistently surpassed African American, Hispanic, and overall students of their local K-8 school district through Grades 4 to 8. Third, the different cohorts of project students had similar levels of achievement overall, although there was a trend for higher achievement among the later cohorts of students who were selected on the basis of both math and reading achievement. Last, participants were well-prepared to succeed in high school. Their Explore scores, which are used for placement in classes in the ninth grade, significantly exceeded those of other Black and Latino students in the district (i.e. the respective effect size for Black and Latino students was 1.58 and 1.21 in math, 1.26 and 1.07 in science, and 0.75 for Black students in reading). Overall, participants of Project Excite were comparable to White students, who have the highest scores in the district.

Blending Practice and Research: Project Excite Along the Way

Project Excite was, first and foremost, an intervention program that identified and provided services to over 360 underrepresented minority high-potential students. Also, it demonstrates a case that blends research and practice with the PEER framework. Specifically, Project Excite exhibited key features of the PEER approach as summarized at the beginning of this article (i.e., for details, see Donovan et al., 2003; Snow, 2015). It started as an attempt to solve a significant problem: racial achievement gaps. It was a collaboration between the local school districts and a research university. As describe above, the collaborations among the stakeholders of Project Excite played a pivotal role in many aspects of the project implementation and research.

The components and activities of Project Excite described above evolved over time and changed continuously in response to students’ needs, curricular/policy changes of the school districts, and as informed by periodical research concerning the efficacy of the project, the social–emotional needs of the participants, and feedback on their experiences and key components of the project (e.g., see four representative empirical studies on Project Excite described above). For example, we added the ITBS to student identification after we learned that project participants need to have good math skills and reading comprehension to succeed in the advanced science classes of the program. Additionally, we removed the teacher referral component of the identification procedures due to concerns that some talented students were being overlooked.

On the other hand, in line with the principles of the PEER approach, the deviations and changes to the project components created new opportunities and issues for research that has potentials to generate valuable data to inform and further improve the project practices.

For instance, when recruiting participants for Project Excite from five different partner elementary schools, we learned that these schools varied greatly in degree of support and instructional resources such as teachers qualified to provide the advanced courses. Beginning with an understanding of the support systems within each school might have led to different implementations of Project Excite activities at the outset. For example, the project could have explored ways to carry out some courses or activities on site within the schools that were able and willing to provide needed support and resources. Going forward, experimenting with different ways to implement the project across partnering schools that vary in many aspects and studying such explorations systemically might help us understand the essential components of a successful intervention across different school settings.

Also, studying the project’s successes, as well as “failures” (e.g., students who discontinued participation or did not show improved achievement), would have given us great insight into why and for whom Project Excite is successful, as well as how it could be fine-tuned to be more effective and beneficial for participating students. Additionally, at the beginning of the project, we did not replace students who left the district or dropped out of their cohort, to avoid the situation of mixed levels of intervention for students in the same cohort. We changed this policy in later years, considering the project’s priority of serving as many needy students as possible. Research on the possible influences of variations in years of participation in the project could lead to findings informative for future iterations of the project.

Some valuable information could have been attained by systematically studying the effects of program changes on students and even their implications possibly generalizable for gifted education practices. For example, Project Excite added ITBS math and reading scores to identify qualified students beginning with Cohort 4. Later, research (i.e., Olszewski-Kubilius et al., 2016) showed that there was a significant increase in the percentage of students attending 4-year colleges—from 73% for Cohorts 1 to 3 to 97% for Cohorts 4 and 5; also, the percentage of students who matriculated at colleges ranked in the top 50 of U.S. colleges moved from 14% for Cohorts 1 to 3 to 43% for Cohorts 4 and 5. Research on whether such changes are related to the addition of ITBS scores in selecting project participants might have practical implications for gifted identification practices.

Furthermore, despite the success of Project Excite, more questions remain, especially considering the broader context of talent development within gifted education. For example, how do we determine and identify potential in students who have had fewer opportunities to learn due to poverty or other disadvantages? Identification strategies such as utilizing local norms and/or the provision of challenging curriculum have been promoted recently in the field, but have not been implemented nor studied on a wide scale (Horn, 2015). Also, there was disagreement among the collaborators of Project Excite about its efficacy and desired outcomes, with some individuals expecting higher rates of matriculation at very selective institutions of higher education when project participants graduated from high school. This raises several intriguing questions. For instance, how should we define success for programs like Project Excite? What should be the reasonable and optimal outcome of an intervention like Project Excite? What level of academic improvement or growth can be considered as a successful outcome if students fall short of being qualified for advanced courses or programs in high school or for admission to highly selective institutions of higher education?

Additionally, how far can we “move the needle” on achievement? Would setting a higher criterion for entering Project Excite (e.g., raising the previously determined 75th percentile to the 85th), result in more students qualified for advanced courses and honors programs in high school or increase their chances for entering more selective universities? Finally, because Project Excite was primarily designed as an intervention to address achievement gaps within the district, program components were adjusted and revised continuously. While that resulted in a rich and comprehensive program, understanding what components were most essential and how these aspects of the project affected students and their families would be necessary for efficient and economical scale-up of the intervention. A future undertaking that embeds rigorously designed research into such “kitchen sink” practices like Project Excite will lead to promising outcomes for both research and practice in gifted education.

In summary, aligning with the PEER framework, much more productive research for the field would be on Project Excite, as with many other interventions that plan, design and anticipate variations in project implementation and outcomes, focus on iteration with variations rather than exact replication, and revise and embrace emerging research issues accordingly. This line of inquiries will yield much more useful information for practitioners and greater positive impact of practices.

Implications for Gifted Programming

Project Excite employs a front-loading strategy to help prepare typically underidentified, underserved high-potential minority students from early grades through middle school so that they can enter and succeed in advanced and accelerated courses. The outcomes of the project support the use of supplemental and outside-of-school programming to address achievement and excellence gaps. Also, research on Project Excite supports the efficacy of using lower cutoffs on standardized tests to identify students with gifted potential, those who can benefit from additional educational opportunities to reach higher levels of achievement and gain entry into advanced academic tracks and programs. In this regard, Project Excite represents a talent development program rather than a traditional gifted program.

As Project Excite demonstrates, the SERP approach and PEER framework offer a lens with which to approach research on program interventions and models and would enable gifted educators and scholars to better understand what kinds of gifted programs work for which students and what components are most important to include in the design. This more nuanced and complex understanding of gifted education is needed to respond to all the gifted students—those with potential to achieve and those already achieving, those from culturally mainstream groups and those from underrepresented populations, and those with access to resources and those with limited resources.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, PhD, is the director of the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University and a professor in the School of Education and Social Policy. Over the past 30 years, she has created programs for all kinds of gifted learners and written extensively about talent development. She has served as the editor of Gifted Child Quarterly, coeditor of the Journal of Secondary Gifted Education, and on the editorial boards of Gifted and Talented International, Roeper Review, and Gifted Child Today. She is past president of the National Association for Gifted Children and received the Distinguished Scholar Award in 2009 from NAGC.

Saiying Steenbergen-Hu, PhD, is a research assistant professor and the research director of the Center for Talent Development of Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy. Her research focuses on the effectiveness of educational interventions on students’ academic achievement and psychosocial development. Her methodological interests and skills include meta-analysis, research synthesis, educational measurement and assessment, quantitative research methodology, and applied statistical analysis. Her meta-analysis, coauthored with Sidney Moon, on the effects of acceleration on high-ability learners won the Gifted Child Quarterly Paper of the Year Award in 2012. Steenbergen-Hu, Makel, and Olszewski-Kubilius recently published “What One Hundred Years of Research Says About Ability-Grouping and Acceleration: Findings of Two Second-Order Meta-Analysis” in Review of Educational Research (Vol. 86, Issue 4, pp. 849-899, 2016).

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