Journal for the Education of the Gifted

This study investigated the Advanced Placement (AP) college readiness indicator among gifted secondary students in Texas during 2019–2021 as related to COVID-19. Utilizing publicly available administrative data from the Texas Education Agency and a hierarchical linear model, the paper identifies changes in Texas school districts’ college readiness success rates across demographic and geographic factors, AP class enrollment, and qualifying score obtainment. Findings indicated a decline in exam participation and success throughout the years, demonstrating a negative influence of the pandemic. Asian students exhibited a greater success rate on AP exams compared to White students, whereas African American, Hispanic, or low-socioeconomic status students showed lower success rates. However, emergent bilingual learners demonstrated more success than the normed reference group. Using the city as the normed geographic location, there was not much difference among suburb, town, and rural area performance. However, the difference between town and rural areas was noticeable.

This article explores how the teachers and students in Tanzania’s special secondary schools conceptualize giftedness and talent. It draws on focus group discussions and interview data from a sample of 30 teachers and 73 students and analyzed through a reflexive thematic analysis procedure. The findings revealed commonalities in conceptualizing giftedness and talent between the teachers and students while suggesting the need for more information on the constructs among the participants. It implies that the development of students’ academic talents in the schools is at stake despite the efforts put in place. The study recommends training teachers on giftedness and talent to improve their understanding and promote a growth mindset among teachers and students to develop the students’ academic potential adequately. Further, the findings suggest the potential to embrace the students’ prior knowledge to develop their academic talents and as an essential resource for improving their provisions in Tanzania.

The State of the States in Gifted Education report is a biennial report that has been published by the Council of State Directors of Programs for the Gifted since 1985. The current study examines financial data from these reports relating to the funding of gifted and talented education (GATE) by state-level funding authorities descriptively. We found an increasing trend in GATE funding among the jurisdictions examined. The increases in funding were relatively modest when adjusted to 2021 real dollars. Further, force majeure events and macroeconomic conditions did not significantly impact GATE funding in jurisdictions that were examined. Finally, the increase in real dollar values of general education funding for K–12 from state allocation outpaced the increases in GATE funding for the same jurisdictions and period. Implication of our findings to practice and directions for future research has been included.

This scoping review reflects on the extant research on parents of the gifted following the last critique of the literature offered by Jolly and Matthews in 2012. The method for the search followed the PRISMA-Scr protocol utilizing the SPIDER framework. Articles fell into two main themes of parental awareness and parental actions in the inductive content analysis. Using the a priori focus areas from the Jolly and Matthews article on the second-round content analysis, articles aligned with the five focus areas: examining attitudes and expectations of nontraditional families, studying the full range of satisfaction with school programming, investigating alignment of parental understanding of terms with researchers, determining how parental understandings translate into behaviors, and reviewing relationship dynamics that contribute to underachievement. There was insufficient evidence for a COVID-19 impact on publications. Findings reflect the importance of including international literature and lay the groundwork for a robust mixed-methods synthesis.