Gifted Child Quarterly

This study emerges from the lack of empirical research on gifted students' attributions about academic success and failure in multiple subject areas and school in general. We explored differences in top attributional choices between boys and girls for success and failure in general academics, language arts, science, and mathematics. Gifted students were more likely to attribute failure to not working hard enough (long-term effort), rather than to not being smart (ability). Sex differences were found in attributional choices for general academics, science, mathematics, and language arts. The findings counter some popular theoretical expectations of gifted students' attributional choices for success and failure in their academic performance.

This study describes psychological characteristics of gifted adolescents. It also identifies the relationships between psychological personality types and suicide ideation. Participants in the study were 152 juniors enrolled in a public residential high school for academically gifted students. The Suicide Ideation Questionnaire, a 30-item self-report measure, was used to assess adolescent levels of suicide ideation. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI; Myers, 1962), a widely used measure of psychological type that contrasts four dimensions of personality—extra-version (E)/introversion (I), sensing (S)/intuition (N), thinking (T)/feeling (F), and judging (J)/perceiving (P)—was used to determine personality types of the students.

The results indicated that gifted adolescents did not exhibit heightened rates of suicide ideation as compared to their nongifted peers. However, female students held higher levels of suicide ideation than male students. Female students exhibiting introversion-perceiving (IP) types held higher levels of suicide ideation than those with other types. There was a significant between-groups effect for the judging-perceiving analysis. Students identified as perceiving personality types held higher levels of suicide ideation than those with the judging personality type. Gender, judging/perceiving, and extraversion/introversion combined to reliably predict approximately 18% of the variance in suicide ideation in this sample.

If the academic needs of the most profoundly gifted students can be met through the use of existing educational practices, specialists in gifted education can assume that the educational needs of less able, but still academically talented, students can also be met by using some combination of these strategies as well. This paper illustrates the feasibility and effectiveness of utilizing an individualized educational approach with gifted students by highlighting the unique educational paths taken by two of the very ablest math prodigies identified by Dr. Julian Stanley through the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) since its founding in 1971. Interviews with Dr. Terence (“Terry”) Tao and Dr. Lenhard (“Lenny”) Ng, now both highly successful mathematicians, are presented in their entirety, demonstrating that even among the very ablest, strategies can be tailored effectively to the characteristics of each student through a combination of creative planning and the cooperation of parents, educators, and mentors.

This study examined the structure of perceived multiple intelligences of 1,464 Chinese gifted students using the Student Multiple Intelligences Profile. To evaluate whether perceived multiple intelligences could be applied adequately across boys and girls, a model hypothesizing different degrees of equivalence across the two gender groups was tested using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. The results indicated that the structure of perceived multiple intelligences, which included the number and nature of dimensions, as well as the structural relationships among the 8 intelligences assessed, was largely similar for boys and girls. Subsequent second-order confirmatory factor analyses separately conducted for boys and for girls suggested that both boys and girls might perceive the 8 intelligences as falling into either the broad category of personal intelligences or one of the nonpersonal intelligences. Implications of the findings including subtle differences in the perceived strengths on the 8 individual intelligences by boys and girls are discussed.