Identification of Gifted Students

This special issue, Volume 46, Issue 3, pulls together work on a question that keeps troubling educators and researchers alike: how do you actually find the gifted children in a classroom, a school, or a wider population? Albert Ziegler and Heidrun Stöger edited the collection, and their opening commentary frames why the topic deserved a dedicated set of papers.

Kurt A. Heller opens the substantive contributions with a broad treatment of how gifted and talented students get identified in the first place. Ziegler and Stöger follow with a piece built around their ENTER approach, which they situate inside the actiotope model of giftedness. The two framings sit together deliberately, one surveying established practice, the other arguing for a particular conceptual grounding.

Michael C. Pyryt returns to Pegnato's older work and reruns the problem through discriminant analysis, asking whether statistical methods can sort gifted children more reliably than teacher judgment alone. Heinz Neber stays with the teacher's role but narrows the setting: he looks at how teachers nominate students for a summer school aimed at the highly gifted, and what those nominations reveal.

Several papers turn toward the children who tend to slip through. Joyce VanTassel-Baska, Annie Xuemei Feng, Chwee Quek and Jeanne Struck examine how educators and students themselves define academic success for underrepresented groups who have been placed in gifted programs. Neville J. Schofield and Risto Hotulainen ask a blunter question with their title, Does all cream rise?, and their answer concerns gifted children who lack support and do not simply flourish on their own.

Klaus K. Urban contributes on the measurement side, laying out the Test for Creative Thinking, Drawing Production (TCT-DP): its underlying concept, how it is applied, how results are evaluated, and what international studies have shown. Peter Heymans and Franz Mönks close the issue with a commentary that steps back across the whole set of papers and reflects on what it means to spot promising individuals in the first place.