Gifted education in the 21st century is in a state of tension regarding its past. Many early pioneers of the field held scientific and social views that are out of step with modern theory in gifted education. Yet, many of these people's work is foundational to gifted education practice in the 21st century schools. Viewpoints of how to navigate this past while maintaining allegiance to modern theory include disowning that past, ignoring it, and building upon it. In this paper, we explore (a) the emergence of gifted education as a field, (b) the early history of gifted education and how it impacts the field today, and (c) suggestions for navigating the tension between the past and the present in gifted education. Though gifted education is over one hundred years old, its early history is still relevant and provides theoretical and practical insights in the form of groundbreaking research, theoretical insights, and cautionary tales.Many areas of applied psychology are the result of scientific attempts to solve a social problem. Drawing on the successes of the applied physical and biological sciences in addressing the concerns of society, applied psychology has the goal of using scientific methods and knowledge about human psychology to better manage social problems, reduce the frequency of unfavorable social outcomes for people, and improve the functioning of individuals. Some areas of applied psychology have seen great success in achieving practitioners' social goals, such as the use of applied behavior analysis, which is an outgrowth of behaviorist psychology. Other fields have been less successful, such as social psychology, which has experienced numerous failed replication attempts in recent years (e.g., Camerer et al., 2018; Open Science Collaboration, 2015), which calls into question whether subtle changes to people's environment can effectively alter human behavior.Gifted education is a field of applied psychology that-like other applied areas-is the product of applying scientific theories, knowledge, and methods to real-world problems. Unlike many areas of psychology, though, education is, by definition, a social enterprise that happens at the individual and group levels. As such, gifted education is bound up within societal contexts and concerns in a way that some other applied psychology fields are not. Consequently, the research, findings, and advances in theory of gifted education cannot be divorced from the social context that they are in some other fields of applied psychology. As society moves away from context in which the original research was conducted, the value of research rooted in past ideals and concerns may come under scrutiny. Yet, science is a cumulative enterprise, and it is not always feasible to distance, in this case, the applied psychology practice of gifted education from RECONCILING GIFTED EDUCATION 4 earlier ideas because current practices will have some grounding in past knowledge-and therefore past contexts. This creates a tension when later generations have ethical and moral st...
Several experts within gifted education have advocated for the use of local norms when selecting students for gifted programs, instead of national-level norms. Local norms compare students to the peers in their school to identify gifted students and are believed to produce a more diverse gifted program. However, one limiting factor on the ability of local norms to diversify gifted programs has been almost completely overlooked in the gifted education community. Through a simplified example, I show in this article that local building-level norms are best at diversifying gifted programs when schools are highly segregated. Conversely, I also show that—when achievement gaps are present and a uniform admissions cutoff is applied—using building-level norms in highly integrated schools produce gifted programs that are highly segregated. In short, the use of building-level local norms trades one form of segregation for another. Implications and recommendations for gifted education and beyond are explored. A preprint version of this article is available at XXXX.
This manuscript was originally intended to be the introduction of the January 2021 special issue of Gifted Child Quarterly, exploring the influence of Lewis Terman’s landmark longitudinal of 1,528 gifted children, which was begun in 1921. On July 22, 2020, the NAGC Board of Directors voted to not publish the special issue, which had been in progress for nearly two years. As all of the articles for the special issue had already been accepted, they have been released on GCQ’s website as online first articles and will subsequently be released in print over three issues in October 2020, January 2021, and April 2021. However, the articles lack the background and context that a special issue would provide. Therefore, we are making some of this context available by posting online this document, which was to serve as the introduction to the special issue. Providing this introduction with links (found in the reference list) to the published articles is our effort to preserve the original intent of the special issue and provide a scholarly view of Terman’s longitudinal study and his larger body of work.
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