Cultivating the social-emotional imagination in gifted education: insights from educational neuroscience (original) (raw)
Related papers
2006
Giftedness, the potential for exceptional achievement, is characterized by high intelligence and creativity. Gifted people exhibit a complex of cognitive, perceptual, emotional, motivational and social traits. Extending neurophysiological hypotheses about the general intelligence (g) factor, a construct is proposed to explain these traits: neural propagation depth. The hypothesis is that in more intelligent brains, activation propagates farther, reaching less directly associated concepts. This facilitates problem-solving, reasoning, divergent thinking and the discovery of connections. It also explains rapid learning, perceptual and emotional sensitivity, and vivid imagination. Flow motivation is defined as the universal desire to balance skills and challenges. Gifted people, being more cognitively skilled, will seek out more difficult challenges. This explains their ambition, curiosity and perfectionism. Balance is difficult to achieve in interaction with non-gifted peers, though, e...
2006
Giftedness, the potential for exceptional achievement, is characterized by high intelligence and creativity. Gifted people exhibit a complex of cognitive, perceptual, emotional, motivational and social traits. Extending neurophysiological hypotheses about the general intelligence (g) factor, a construct is proposed to explain these traits: neural propagation depth. The hypothesis is that in more intelligent brains, activation propagates farther, reaching less directly associated concepts. This facilitates problem-solving, reasoning, divergent thinking and the discovery of connections. It also explains rapid learning, perceptual and emotional sensitivity, and vivid imagination. Flow motivation is defined as the universal desire to balance skills and challenges. Gifted people, being more cognitively skilled, will seek out more difficult challenges. This explains their ambition, curiosity and perfectionism. Balance is difficult to achieve in interaction with non-gifted peers, though, explaining the gifted's autonomy, non-conformism and feeling of alienation. Together with the difficulty to find fitting challenges this constitutes a major obstacle to realizing the gifted's potential. The appendix sketches a simulation using word association networks to test the propagation depth model by answering IQ-test-like questions.
Gifted education: changing conceptions, emphases and practice
International Studies in Sociology of Education, 2014
Gifted education is leading an interdisciplinary paradigm shift moving education out of its historic role of entrenching systemic inequities. It is a crucible for pioneering investigations of optimal human development and provides a vehicle for increasing social equity. We review changing conceptions of intelligence, motivation and creativity, and consider current findings on processes that affect the development of high ability. We discuss the role of context and neuroscience as they apply to understanding the development of giftedness. We describe changing emphases in gifted education, focusing on the shift from categorical homogeneity to developmental diversity, concluding that giftedness and talent are best understood as dynamic, fluid, domain-specific and context-sensitive processes. Finally, we consider implications for educational practice: How do these changes impact definition, prediction, identification, programming, psychosocial practices and teacher development, opening up opportunities for optimal learning, development and fulfillment across the population, and across the life span?
Chapter 30 Development of GiftedMotivation : Longitudinal Research and Applications
2018
Gifted motivation was proposed by Gottfried & Gottfried (2004) as an area of giftedness in and of itself distinct from intellectual giftedness. Gifted motivation applies to those individuals who are superior in their strivings and determination pertaining to an endeavor. The foundation for theorizing about and providing empirical validation for this construct is based on the authors’ longitudinal study of giftedness in the realm of academic intrinsic motivation. Academic intrinsic motivation is defined as enjoyment of school learning characterized by an orientation toward mastery, curiosity, persistence, task-endogeny, and the learning of challenging, difficult, and novel tasks. The present chapter will present theory and contemporary findings regarding gifted motivation, and how this relate to concurrent and long-term outcomes from childhood through early adulthood. Implications for identification of gifted motivation, program selection, and program development and evaluation will ...
Journal of Applied Psychology, 1995
A sample of 162 intellectually gifted adolescents (top 1%) were administered the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory at age 13. Fifteen years later, they were administered the Strong again. This study evaluated the intra-and interindividual temporalstability of the 6 RIASEC(Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) themes and the Strong's 23 Basic Interest Scales. Over the 15-year test-retest interval, RIASEC's median interindividual correlation for the 6 themes was .46; the median ofall 162 intraindividual correlations was .57. Configural analyses of the most dominant theme at age 13 revealed that this theme wassignificantly more likely than chance to be either dominantor adjacent to the dominant theme at age 28-following RIASEC's hexagonal structure. For intellectually gifted individuals, it appears to be possible to forecast salient features of their adult RIASECprofile by assessing their vocational interests during early adolescence, but some RIASECthemesseem morestable than others. Just as study-to-study fluctuations in ability-performance correlations are known to be duelargely to small samples, unreliability of predictors and criteria, and restriction of range (Humphreys, 1992; Schmidt & Hunter, 1981), it also is known now that these very same factors operate to attenuate the covariation between individual differences within the top 1% of ability and educational-vocational criteria (Benbow, 1992; Lubinski & Dawis, 1992, pp. 41-42). When intellectually gifted 7th graders (top 1~2%) are given the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), an instrument designed for able 11th and 12th graders, they generate score distributions indistinguishable from random samples of high school students (Benbow, 1988; Keating & Stanley, 1972). Moreover, when academic-vocationalcriteria with sufficiently high ceilings are regressed onto these SAT score distributions, substantively significant correlations are observed over 10-year time frames (Benbow, 1992)-from age 13, when SAT predictor-assessments are conducted,to age 23, when academic-vocational longitudinal-criterion-data are collected. These long-range (adolescence to adulthood) forecasts add applied psychological significance to ability-based predictions regarding the amountof learning that gifted adolescents can achieve and should be allowed to achieve (Humphreys, 1985;
Commitment, creativity and brains: Perspectives on gifted education
2020
This chapter presents three current perspectives that come together to think about the educational practices of gifted children. The theoretical advances regarding commitment, creativity and the brain are discussed, lines of research that show the importance of promoting the configuration of instructional contexts that highlight differences in ways of learning, respecting 238the times and styles of each person, from the socio-constructivist perspective. From a sociocultural approach, arguments are put forward for understanding that giftedness is the result of the joint interaction of multiple contextual and personal factors, resulting in the value of practices found in the model of the three rings.Fil: Rigo, Daiana Yamila. Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Territoriales y Educativas - Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Territoriale...
How advances in gifted education contribute to innovation education, and vice versa
The Routledge International Handbook of Innovation Education, 2006
Gifted education can be seen as a frontier of innovation education, wherein the nurturing of creativity has been an educational priority. Parallel to the first two stages of research on creativity, with its emphasis on person and process, gifted education has focused on two aspects of innovation education: how to provide a good educational match for those who demonstrate unique creative potential, and how to nurture creativity through curricular and instructional designs. These explorations have proved highly meaningful for general innovation education. In recent years, creativity researchers have broadened their perspectives beyond person and process to encompass complex social-cognitive dynamics and synergistic power. Technological advances and availability of cyber resources also make it possible to design an education gearing toward developing personal creativity on all fronts of human endeavor. It is argued that gifted education can learn from these new movements in innovation education and broaden its education scope accordingly.
Interplay of Creativity and Giftedness in Science
Interplay of Creativity and Giftedness in Science, 2016
Advances in Creativity and Gifted Education (ADVA) is the first internationally established book series that focuses exclusively on the constructs of creativity and giftedness as pertaining to the psychology, philosophy, pedagogy and ecology of talent development across the milieus of family, school, institutions and society. ADVA strives to synthesize both domain specific and domain general efforts at developing creativity, giftedness and talent. The books in the series are international in scope and include the efforts of researchers, clinicians and practitioners across the globe.