Gifted Child Quarterly

Educational acceleration is well established as a best practice for meeting the learning needs of precocious youth. It occupies one region of a broader spectrum of interventions designed to align educational curricula with students’ learning readiness, namely, appropriate developmental placement. Despite over 100 years of robust longitudinal support, educational acceleration is not reliably implemented in practice or educational theorizing. This investigation extends this literature through a mixed-methods approach to the educational experiences and perspectives of intellectually precocious youths as adults. Study 1 examines the experiences and views of Gifted (N = 1,279) and Highly Gifted (N = 479) individuals in their mid-30s on homogeneous grouping for instruction. Study 2 constitutes a constructive replication of Study 1 involving an unobtrusive generalization probe administered to Profoundly Gifted participants (N = 241) and Top STEM Doctoral Students (N = 695) in their mid-20s. Study 2 focuses on participants’ high school likes and dislikes to determine whether they unobtrusively capture sentiments indicative of appropriate developmental placement in general and educational acceleration in particular. Collectively, participants appear to crave advanced and challenging educational material. Across cohorts and genders, a longitudinal examination of potential moderators revealed that these results did not covary with lifestyle/occupational outcomes at age 50. Findings align with Carroll’s Model of School Learning, Cronbach’s formulation of aptitude × treatment interactions, and modern measurement procedures. They support tailoring curricula to academic readiness for maximizing learning. They also highlight how contextual features embedded in educational settings beyond strictly academic material facilitate learning and psychological development.

Research in the field of gifted and talented has significantly shifted in recent years to focus on broader conceptualizations of the construct, including performing arts, creativity, and leadership. Yet, it is not clear how states conceptualize and identify students as gifted and talented given the last review of state gifted and talented regulations (i.e., laws) was conducted more than a decade ago, and organizational policy documents were limited in scope. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to review state gifted and talented definitions and identification procedures and to compare findings with prior research. Furthermore, we reviewed policies for identifying underrepresented populations in gifted and talented education. Results showed that there is considerable variability in how states define gifted and talented (i.e., categories included in gifted definitions) and how they identify gifted and talented. In this review, states included broader categories in gifted and talented definitions (e.g., creativity, performing arts) and allowed for a wider variety of assessment procedures compared with prior reviews. However, compared to 2012, this study’s findings showed that fewer states included general policies for the identification of traditionally underrepresented students as gifted and talented. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

This cross-country study employed a qualitative design to explore teachers’ views of their gifted students and of these students’ adjustment and education during the Covid-19 pandemic. A total of 52 teachers from Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia were interviewed about gifted students in general and, in continuation, about a particular gifted student who was selected for the purpose of this study. In both instances and across all three countries, the teachers tended to describe gifted students mainly in terms of the “harmony hypothesis.” Teaching these students in pandemic circumstances only added to the harmony view: The gifted were seen as having adapted quickly and without much academic loss to the new (learning) conditions. Nevertheless, the pandemic experience also seems to have allowed teachers to see a systemic neglect of gifted students and clearly notice the need for proper enrichment and social-emotional support if these students are to reach their full potential.

While it is now argued that intellectual giftedness is not causally associated with well-being, the individual and environmental determinants associated remain empirically underexplored. Trying to fill this gap, this study investigated potential risk and protective factors on the well-being and mental health of 219 Canadian intellectually gifted adults. Exploratory transversal analyses were conducted between 11 determinants frequently evoked in the literature on intellectually gifted individuals and hedonic well-being (positive/negative affect; ∝ = .85–.87; satisfaction with life; ∝ = .88), eudemonic well-being (existential crisis/meaning in life; ∝ = .76–.87; interpersonal connection; ∝ = 92) and psychopathologies. Results show that twice-exceptionality and lower socioeconomic status are risk factors for the development of psychopathologies, while being married/in civil union and having a higher perceived level of potential achievement are protective factors for hedonic and eudemonic well-being. Results are discussed in light of previous knowledge about gifted individuals.