Table Of ContentConceptions
of Giftedness
and Talent
Edited by
Robert J. Sternberg · Don Ambrose
Conceptions of Giftedness and Talent
Robert J. Sternberg • Don Ambrose
Editors
Conceptions of
Giftedness and Talent
Editors
Robert J. Sternberg Don Ambrose
Department of Human Development Department of Graduate Education
Cornell University Rider University
Ithaca, NY, USA Lawrenceville, NJ, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-56868-9 ISBN 978-3-030-56869-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56869-6
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This book is dedicated to all the gifted children in the world, those who have
been identified and those who have not been but, we hope, soon will be!
Preface
Many parents of schoolchildren (including one of the editors, who is a parent
of five children) are frustrated with the relatively narrow criteria schools use to
identify gifted children. Typically, the schools use scores on tests of academic
skills and achievement as well as teacher recommendations. They then end up
identifying as gifted those who excel at the mechanics of verbal and symbolic
processing and willingly doing what they are told to do but who are not neces-
sarily excellent in other ways. This is especially the case when we consider
skills that may be more important, say, for the survival of the world as we
know it. Scores on standardized tests will not tell us who will become the
active, concerned citizens who try to make a positive, meaningful, and endur-
ing difference to the world—the ones, in other words, who are truly gifted
and talented in terms of what they have to offer the world. Can the world,
given its current state, really afford to identify children simply on the basis of
skills that lead to high school grades but not necessarily a whole lot more? This
is not to say that traditional conceptions of giftedness and talent are necessar-
ily “wrong” but rather that they are woefully incomplete.
Current conceptions of giftedness lean heavily on the conception put for-
ward by Lewis M. Terman early in the twentieth century. Terman identified
children in California largely on the basis of their scores on the Stanford-Binet
Intelligence Scales. It certainly makes sense to look at IQ as one component
of giftedness: People with higher IQs tend, on average, to be more successful
than people with lower IQs in many avenues of life, such as in careers and in
their personal lives (Deary & Whalley, 2009; Terman, 1925; Terman & Oden,
1959). But such “success” is not necessarily the kind that changes the world
for the better. Indeed, there are many “successful” graduates of the most pres-
tigious universities who go on to make a total mess of things, as witnessed by
vii
viii Preface
the global financial collapse in 2008 and current fiascoes in the US govern-
ment (the shutdown of 2019), in the British government (the badly mishan-
dled Brexit of 2018–2019), and in governments around the world (the
panoply of ill-conceived responses to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020).
Many people—laymen and experts alike—have believed that there is a
need for broader conceptions of giftedness. To address this belief, Robert
J. Sternberg and Janet E. Davidson edited the volume Conceptions of Giftedness,
first published in 1986 (Sternberg & Davidson, 1986) and then appearing in
a second edition in 2005 (Sternberg & Davidson, 2005). The goal of the book
was to present broader and more diverse conceptions of giftedness than had
been prevalent in the field prior to the publication of the volumes.
The second edition of the book is now quite out of date. A great deal of new
work has appeared since 2005. For example, Goleman’s (2005) book on emo-
tional intelligence appeared the same year as the revision of Conceptions of
Giftedness. Sternberg and Jordan’s (2005) Handbook of Wisdom appeared in
the same year. Keith Stanovich’s What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of
Rational Thinking (Stanovich, 2009) did not appear until four years later.
Ambrose, Sternberg, and Sriraman’s (2012) book on confronting dogmatism
in gifted education did not appear until seven years later. As a result, topics
such as emotional intelligence, wisdom, and rational thinking received essen-
tially no attention in the revised Conceptions volume. Given the state of the
world today—which some would argue is much more precarious than in
2005—attributes such as emotional intelligence, wisdom, and rationality
would appear to be more important than ever to conceptions of giftedness
and talent. Moreover, the 1986 and 2005 editions were largely (although not
exclusively) US-centric. They placed a very strong emphasis on North
American views.
To address these issues, we have edited a new volume, Conceptions of
Giftedness and Talent: Worldwide Perspectives. We have added the term “talent”
because it refers to skills that are not necessarily highly general and also more
implies modifiability than the term “giftedness” typically does. This book,
therefore, could be viewed as a new start entirely.
As an additional note, Janet E. Davidson co-edited the first two editions of
Conceptions of Giftedness with Robert J. Sternberg, but she was unable to par-
ticipate as a co-editor in this new volume. We are grateful to Dr. Davidson for
her invaluable contributions to the earlier two volumes. Sternberg asked Don
Ambrose, one of the most prominent individuals in the field of giftedness and
the editor of a premier journal on giftedness, Roeper Review, to join him in
this venture. Ambrose and Sternberg have edited several volumes together and
were delighted to team up for this new endeavor.
Preface ix
The main goal of the book is to present diverse conceptions of giftedness and tal-
ent viewed from a variety of worldwide perspectives. We seek to cover classical
views, emphasizing IQ, but also to get away from the common exclusive
emphasis on IQ-based skills.
We asked authors to write in a way that would be accessible to students of
giftedness, scholars, educators, and parents as well. We believed that the book
would accomplish our aim of changing the way gifted education is done only
if the chapters were written in a way that educators and parents, not just
scholars, could understand. At the same time, we asked authors to preserve
scholarly integrity of the highest order because we are aware, as are many oth-
ers, that giftedness as a field has attracted many “snake-oil salesmen” who
know little about the theory and research in the field and merely look to
peddle their commercial ideas in the hope of making money, whatever may
happen with the children who are affected by their efforts.
Authors were given free rein to write about their conception as they best
could communicate it. Nevertheless, to ensure coherence of the book, we
asked authors to ensure that they deal with five basic questions:
1. What is your conception of giftedness and talent?
2. What is the empirical evidence that supports your conception?
3. How would one identify gifted and talented children, based on your
conception?
4. How would one teach gifted and talented children, based on your
conception?
5. What do you see as the advantage of your conception over traditional ones?
We believe that the book has special features that will make it especially
attractive to readers and hence eminently salable:
1. Editors who are eminent in the field of giftedness and talent but also who
represent the newer views on what giftedness and talent mean.
2. Authors who are among the most eminent scholars and, in many cases,
also practitioners in the field of giftedness and talent. All of the authors
have top scholarly credentials.
3. Worldwide points of view, not only North American ones.
4. Relatively short chapters that recognize our readers have limited time and
need to receive presentations of material within relatively tight space
constraints.
5. A concluding chapter by the editors integrating the different points of
view and showing ways in which major ideas, even when given different
x Preface
names, can be integrated to provide a holistic and integral viewpoint on
giftedness and talent.
We hope you enjoy this book. We all have worked hard on it and hope that
it provides you with a broad introduction to the field of giftedness that will
help you to move forward in your own endeavors to understand and apply the
latest ideas in the field of giftedness.
Ithaca, NY, USA Robert J. Sternberg
Lawrenceville, NJ, USA Don Ambrose
References
Ambrose, D., Sternberg, R. J., & Sriraman, B. (Eds.) (2012). Confronting dogmatism
in gifted education. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.
Deary, I. J., & Whalley, L. J. (2009). A lifetime of intelligence: Follow-up studies of the
Scottish mental surveys of 1932 and 1947. Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Goleman, D. (2005). Emotional intelligence. New York, NY: Bantam.
Stanovich, K. E. (2009). What intelligence tests miss: The psychology of rational thought.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sternberg, R. J., & Davidson, J. E. (Eds.) (1986). Conceptions of giftedness. New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J., & Davidson, J. E. (Eds.) (2005). Conceptions of giftedness (2nd ed.).
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J., & Jordan, J. (Eds.) (2005). A handbook of wisdom: Psychological
perspectives. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/
CBO9780511610486
Terman, L. M. (1925). Genetic studies of genius: Mental and physical traits of a thou-
sand gifted children (Vol. 1). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Terman, L. M., & Oden, M. H. (1959). The gifted group at mid-life: 35 years’ follow-
up of the superior child. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Contents
1 Interdisciplinary Exploration Guiding Conceptions of
Giftedness 1
Don Ambrose
2 Talent Development, Cultural Diversity, and Equity: The
Challenge of the Andean Countries 21
Sheyla Blumen
3 The Trouble with Conceptions of Giftedness 37
James H. Borland
4 Overcoming Structural Challenges Related to Identification
and Curricula for Gifted Students in High-Poverty Rural
Schools 51
Carolyn M. Callahan and Amy Price Azano
5 Where Does Creativity Come from? What Is Creativity?
Where Is Creativity Going in Giftedness? 65
Dowon Choi and James C. Kaufman
6 A School-Based Conception of Giftedness: Clarifying Roles
and Responsibilities in the Development of Talent in Our
Public Schools 83
Tracy L. Cross and Jennifer Riedl Cross
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