Despite changes, gender differences in math and science continue to exist in some countries. We examined whether the actiotopes of boys and girls at the high school level in math and science differed and the extent to which (a) their actiotope components, (b) the progressive development of their actiotopes (dynamic perspective), and (c) the…

Recent handbooks of giftedness or expertise propose a plethora of conceptions on the development of excellent performance but, to our knowledge, there are no comparative studies that provide empirical evidence of their validity to guide researchers and practitioners in their adoption of a particular conception. This study sought to close that gap…

The reported study investigated students' perceptions of their high-performing classmates in terms of intelligence, social skills, and conscientiousness in different school subjects. The school subjects for study were examined with regard to cognitive, physical, and gender-specific issues. The results show that high academic achievements in…

In this target article, we argue that current approaches to gifted education are based on the erroneous view that to understand the development of exceptionality we need to understand firstly the components of giftedness, including cognitive such as intelligence and non-cognitive factors such as motivation. In contrast, systemic approaches to…

The commentaries to our target article "Towards a systemic theory of gifted education" differed in their assessments of the various arguments we put forward. Of the more than 40 responses to our target article, 27 responses were chosen as being representative of all commentaries. We grouped the responses according to the main points in our target…

Mentoring is considered among the most effective pedagogical measures, yet it is rarely used in gifted education. One of the main reasons for this neglect seems to be the lack of a thorough analysis of its conceptual foundations from the point of view of giftedness research. This contribution starts with a discussion of conceptual and definitional…

The attainment of exceptional accomplishments requires extremely long periods of time. It has yet to be explained, though, how individuals find the motivation for such protracted learning. Carol Dweck proposed that an incremental theory of an individual's abilities is an important factor in this process since it would account for the optimism…

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the dramatic consequences the application of cut-off points can have in the practice of identifying gifted individuals. The paradoxical attenuation effect describes the frequent situation in which measurements of the gifts and talents individuals possess are lower than their true values. However, in…

In this article, the author's comments are divided into two parts. In the first part, he tries to compose succinct formulations of the three challenges with which Professor Ericsson has confronted giftedness researchers. The following are Ericsson's three challenges of giftedness research: (1) Is there empirical evidence that reproducibly superior…

This report is an evaluation of an attributional retraining intervention conceptualized to promote girls gifted in the natural sciences. The attributional retraining was based on a modeling technique, and conceptualized for ninth-grade chemistry students attending a college preparatory high school (German Gymnasium). The aim of the training was to…