Engaging With Gifted Education’s Past to Inform the Present and the Future

Abstract

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.