Traditional career education activities at the secondary level consist of academic, aptitude, skills, interests, and, less often, personality assessments that assist students in narrowing viable career options. Although this strategy is reasonable, its attempt to objectify the career decision-making process does not address two important components of career decision-making—personal values and social-emotional concerns. Because gifted students possess characteristics, such as heightened sensitivity, multipotentiality, and perfectionism, that might complicate this process, appropriately differentiated career education includes these dimensions, especially during times of transition. Due to gaps in preparation and training, school counselors may feel inadequate in meeting these students’ unique social-emotional needs. For gifted rural students, career decision-making may be especially difficult as parents, school counselors, teachers, and other adults in the community encourage students to leave their small towns to realize their college and career dreams elsewhere. Rural students often experience deep connections to family and place, further complicating this developmental task of adolescence. This study highlights the voices of 19 gifted rural students as they share their thoughts and concerns regarding K-12 career education, values, and attachments to family and community. Considerations for school counselors and teachers who work in rural settings are included.
Underrepresentation of students from low-income families and/or certain ethnic groups has been a persistent worldwide problem in the field of gifted education. Because teachers frequently serve as gatekeepers for students’ participation in gifted programming, their roles in the identification process are critical. In this study, 55 elementary school teachers in South Korea completed a teacher-rating scale (HOPE Scale; Peters & Gentry, 2012a) for all students ( n = 1,157) in their classrooms, including their evaluation of each students’ reading and mathematics talents. Their ratings and talent evaluations were then compared to students’ reading and mathematics achievement scores to determine whether teachers’ ratings promoted more equitable identification of students from underrepresented groups. In addition, we explored the effects of combining various cut-off scores for each assessment for the identification of students from low-income and/or culturally diverse families.
The place-based investment model (PBIM) of talent development is a programming model for developing talents of high-potential youth in ways that could serve as an investment in the community. In this article, we discuss the PBIM within rural contexts. The model is grounded in three theories—Moon’s personal talent development theory, Sternberg’s theory of successful intelligence, and social cognitive career theory—and specifies five pathways for developing talent: (a) enrichment, (b) advanced learning, (c) human connections, (d) entrepreneurial thinking, and (e) specialized guidance. Through this proposal, we intend to focus place-based talent development efforts in rural areas on giving high-potential young people the knowledge, skills, and tools for understanding themselves, for developing their strengths and passions, and for recognizing localized opportunities for achieving self-fulfillment in adulthood.
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