The Case for a Schism: High-Ability Psychology and Advanced Academics

• In Event: Perspectives on the Role of and Relationship Between Gifted Education in Research and in K-12 Schools

Abstract

The term “gifted” should be recognized as what it is; a term that does not represent a meaningful feature of the social and psychological universe in a useful way, at least with regard to K-12 education. This is a key point of emphasis. We believe that individuals who perceive the world differently do exist, and that some will go on to become eminent creative producers at the pinnacle of their fields, but that the identification of these individuals (i.e., searching for those who will become eminent) is not the best use of resources from the standpoint of K-12 education. It’s also not something that current forms of educational assessment can do. An analysis of the term “gifted”, and its many unavoidable connotations reveals the fundamental fallacies at its heart. Freeing ourselves, our field, and our schools, of this unhelpful concept will, in our view, remove an invisible intellectual straightjacket that has tied our hands and blinded our eyes to obvious changes that should be made to schools to support high-achieving and potentially high-achieving students.
It is critical at this point to clarify what we mean. We do not argue that bright children do not exist – those whose minds work in qualitatively different ways and develop at rates asynchronous with their physical development. Instead we believe that many children in our schools need a great deal more challenge, opportunity, and intellectual rigor than many schools have thus far provided them. Because of this, a widespread discarding of this old concept of “giftedness” on the part of parents, teachers, researchers, and advocates for gifted children could be the very best thing that can happen to the gifted child. We should let go of an outdated way of thinking and replace it with thinking that is useful in today’s schools and beneficial to much larger numbers of today’s children. The psychological focus (what we will refer to as high ability psychology) is still incredibly important and should continue to be researched. However, its role in K-12 schools is dubious. Instead, schools should focus on the development of those skills and talents that fall within the purview of schools. K-12 schools cannot take responsibility for the development of all possible talents in all domains of human endeavor. Rather, there is a semi-standardized set of academic skills (which can include far more than math and reading), which are the focus of public K-12 education. Thus, these academic skills should be the focus of talent identification systems and advanced programming options. Throughout this session we will refer to this focus as the study of and programming for advanced academics.
This paper will present the NAGC conceptual definition of giftedness as a way to explore why traditional applications are not working to foster the needs of advanced students. We will highlight four challenges inherent in the NAGC definition as well as potential solutions in our new, proposed schism: arbitrary cutoffs, being instead of doing, the missing point of comparison, and the categorization of a continuous concept.

Authors

• Matthew McBee, East Tennessee State University

• D. Betsy Mccoach, University of Connecticut