Journal for the Education of the Gifted

Exemplary adolescent creative writers’ stories and poems demonstrate a connection between personal purposes for writing and the development of advanced technical skills. This hermeneutic analysis of 33 student texts (which were chosen because of their relation to the topic of literacy) reveals three main reasons for writing (remembrance, reinvention, and communion) as well as an understanding of the writing process as fickle. Writings that focus on remembrance include depictions of qualia through sensory imagery and poetic techniques. Writings that express reinvention and communion reveal an understanding of the history of words, forms, and the canon. Writings that depict writing as fickle invite discussions of the writing process and the value of perseverance, observation, and empathy. A practical implication of this research is that creativity and identity development through writing are compatible with comprehension, analysis, and technical mastery.

Curriculum ideologies are educational theories applied in everyday pedagogical practice. In this study, to better meet the learning needs of their students, four middle school teachers used a variety of ideologies as a professional toolbox. When confronted with school district standardization, these teachers adapted; however, as predicted by earlier studies, adjustments required the loss of previously successful curriculum. As predicted by Feldhusen, these losses affected teachers of high-level students (honors and gifted and talented) the most. In this district, two such teachers opposed standardization; nevertheless, even with resistance, they lost ideological-based curriculum choices. What are teachers of high-level students to do? Any standardization program will threaten and/or change eclectic ideological praxes. With such a dichotomy, a split is revealed between teacher beliefs and practices. In this study, an honors teacher could not bear the split and decided to stop teaching rather than give up her curricular eclecticism.

This study investigated the educational provision for mathematically gifted students offered in primary (elementary) schools in England (United Kingdom) just before the abandonment of the government’s Gifted and Talented (G&T) program. Through a questionnaire within five Educational Authorities and four in-depth case studies in different primary schools that were implementing provision for their most able mathematicians, the study, despite some positive results, found a number of problems relating to the effectiveness and defensibility of the offered provision. This article presents those problems and the identified links between them, the lack of support from gifted theory and research, the lack of support from specialists, and the abandonment of the G&T initiative and makes recommendations that could have sustained and increased the effectiveness of both the schools’ provision and the government’s initiative.

Little empirical data are available concerning the cognitive abilities of gifted individuals in general and especially those who excel in mathematics. We examined visual processing abilities distinguishing between general giftedness (G) and excellence in mathematics (EM). The research population consisted of 190 students from four groups of 10th- to 12th-grade students who differed in their G and EM levels. The students performed a battery of visual processing tests: visual-spatial memory, visual speed of information processing (SVIP), visual perception (VP), and visual attention (VA). The results demonstrate that EM type has a significant effect on the Backward Corsi-Span, whereas G type has a main effect on the Pattern-Recognition test and d2-CP (concentration performance) and d2-E (number of errors) scores in the attention test. SVIP and the fluctuation rate in VA tests (d2-FR) were associated with both G and EM types. The current study identified two different components of visual processing that were accordingly termed Visual-Serial and Pattern-Recall. It seems that G-EM students can be characterized by superior performance on Visual-Serial processing.