Background: For schools to include quality STEM education, it is important to understand teachers' beliefs and perceptions related to STEM talent development. Teachers, as important persons within a student's talent development, hold prior views and experiences that will influence their STEM instruction. This study attempts to understand what is known about teachers' perceptions of STEM education by examining existing literature. Results: Study inclusion criteria consisted of empirical articles, which aligned with research questions, published in a scholarly journal between 2000 and 2016 in English. Participants included in primary studies were preK-12 teachers. After quality assessment, 25 articles were included in the analysis. Thematic analysis was used to find themes within the data. Findings indicate that while teachers value STEM education, they reported barriers such as pedagogical challenges, curriculum challenges, structural challenges, concerns about students, concerns about assessments, and lack of teacher support. Teachers felt supports that would improve their effort to implement STEM education included collaboration with peers, quality curriculum, district support, prior experiences, and effective professional development. Conclusions:Recommendations for practice include quality in-service instruction over STEM pedagogy best practices and district support of collaboration time with peer teachers. Recommendations for future research are given.

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While neither the notion of personality being related to creativity, nor the idea that the diverse conceptions and measures of creativity can cloud the field are new, the 2 thoughts are rarely combined. Using a systematic review methodology, 1 overarching question was examined: Do differential creativity-personality relationships exist based on different creativity conceptions or measurement schemes? In the review, 188 reported relationships of creativity to personality across 96 peer-reviewed, empirical studies were examined and coded for definitions and measurements of creativity. Results support standing beliefs regarding openness and extraversion as strong positive predictors. However, the amount of creativity variance explained differed as much as 8 times depending on the type of assessment. Production measures and self-reported measures were more related to personality than ideation and externally rated measures. The 4 elements of divergent thinking also demonstrated differential relationships to personality. The results of this analysis encourage subsequent research that is more discerning when interpreting the relationships between creativity and personality.

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Approximately 9.6 million (20%) K-12 students in the United States are enrolled in rural school districts. Rural school districts are found in every state, and while they make up 20% of the total student population, rural school districts constitute 33% of the schools in the nation. In some states, the proportion of rural school districts is as low as 6% and in others the proportion of rural districts reaches as high as 78%. In Mississippi, Vermont, and Maine, more than 50% of the students are enrolled in rural districts (Strange, Johnson, Showalter, & Klein, 2012). Rural school districts and the student population attending them may exhibit qualitative and quantitative differences making them unique educational environments deserving of attention from both policy makers and practitioners (Cromartie & Bucholtz, 2008; Plucker, 2013). Unfortunately, a number of studies have documented potential challenges for rural school districts to provide gifted education (Azano et al., 2011; Cross & Burney, 2005; Hébert & Beardsley, 2001). Though 32 (64%) of the states in the United States have policy mandates to either identify or provide services for gifted students (National Association for Gifted Children, 2013), inequities in gifted education services continue to exist even under state mandates (Baker, 2001; Baker & Friedman-Nimz, 2004). Furthermore, studies have found consistent underfunding of gifted education programs in rural school districts (Baker & McIntire, 2003; Howley, Rhodes, & Beall, 2009). Inequity of opportunity has been an ongoing concern for the broader field of gifted education (Esquierdo & Arreguín-Anderson, 2012; Stephens, 2011; Swanson, 2007). Educational opportunities for gifted students vary by socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity (Ford, Harris, Tyson, & Trotman, 2002) and by locale (Cross & Burney, 2005; Kettler, Russell, & Puryear, 2015). Generally, rural schools and schools with a preponderance of low-socioeconomic students provide fewer resources and opportunities for identified gifted students than their counterparts in other locales and socioeconomic conditions (Baker & McIntire, 2003). It is not surprising then that gifted students in rural settings tend to be underrepresented in the research literature of both gifted education and rural education (Arnold, Newman, Gaddy, & Dean, 2005; Azano, 2014). Despite the relative lack of attention, studies have found locale to be associated with variance in educational opportunities-including gifted education programs and services (Lawrence, 2009). In particular, students in rural settings are less likely to be identified as gifted and generally have fewer opportunities for gifted education services (Lawrence, 2009; Pendarvis & Wood, 2009). Similarly, Howley et al. (2009) found that gifted programs in rural areas across the United States were consistently underfunded due to three common 690229G CQXXX10.