This study explored the early development of expert athletes compared to a group of athletes that did not achieve an expert level of performance despite being involved in youth events with their national squads. In particular, the activities, training patterns, and psychosocial influences that characterized their paths in competitive sports were…

In their target paper, "Towards a systemic theory of gifted education," A. Ziegler and S. N. Phillipson present a long awaited call for a paradigmatic shift in thinking within the field of gifted education. The paper considers how educators and researchers within the field could bring about such a change. They challenge the prevailing…

As Ziegler and Phillipson discussed in their article "Towards a systemic theory of gifted education," various paradigms, models and theories have been described in the extensive literature on giftedness. According to Ziegler and Phillipson, there is a pressing need for new models of giftedness--they call for a paradigm shift. The actiotope model…

From past knowledge of Ziegler's and Phillipson's work, the author knew before reading the manuscript that there would be significant conceptual disagreements. Yet, he was hoping to find enough points of convergence that they could lead to enriching exchanges and, maybe, future shared efforts at bridging gaps between their respective views.…

Ziegler and Phillipson began the target article by citing the mechanistic tradition of finding meaning in the natural world and applying this to various processes of identifying giftedness (Ziegler & Stoeger, 2008)--and demonstrating its ineffectiveness in traditional gifted education. The systems theory is said to allow for a greater…

Knowledge regarding giftedness and gifted education is supplied by different sources of information and different research paradigms. Particularly relevant approaches are here the psychometric paradigm, the expert-novice paradigm, and the explanatory approaches from cognitive sciences, also the quasi-experimental social and developmental studies…

Models of giftedness are aimed at creating a picture of aspects which are important for developing a special talent. Approved models of giftedness are based on influencing factors like genetic, environmental and individual orientated variables. Within the approach of these models lay a shift in the conceptions about giftedness from individual…

The aim of this work is to analyze the dimensional structure of the Spanish version of the School and College Ability Test, employed in the process for the identification of students with high intellectual abilities. This test measures verbal and mathematical (or quantitative) abilities at three levels of difficulty: elementary (3rd, 4th, and 5th…

The aim of this study was trying to predict success in the qualifying round for the International Chemistry Olympiad (IChO) on the basis of the expectancy-value model of achievement motivation by Eccles et al. The investigation with 52 participants, including 14 females, was conducted during the third of four qualifying rounds of the IChO in…

Studies have shown sex differences regarding "overexcitabilities": women score higher than men in emotional and sensual overexcitability whereas men tend to excel in intellectual as well as in psychomotor overexcitability. Some studies even found no sex differences at all. Many studies comprised gifted/talented subjects. Taking into account the…

The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the academic achievements of 200 talented athletes in 1992/1993 and 200 in 2006/2007, aged 14-16 years. When compared with the national average, the athletes in 2006/2007 attended pre-university classes more often (X[superscript 2] = 57.001, p less than 0.05). Of the 2006/2007 athletes, a higher…

In recent years, there has been an increasing recognition that the educational needs of able students were not being adequately met in British schools resulting in a series of governmental educational initiatives aiming at improving the education of able students. The establishment of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY) at…

The differences between US (Ohio) gifted and talented high school students and South Korean gifted and talented high school students on the "Overexcitabilities Questionnaire II" (OEQ II) were investigated. The OEQ II was administered to 227 Ohio identified gifted and talented high school students (M = 88, F = 139) and to 341 high school students…

Ninety university undergraduate students were tested on a number of tasks assessing their recognition of possible and impossible figures, mental rotation, ideational fluency, and self-report artistic and creative characteristics. Scores on the Impossible Figures Task (IFT-14) and the Mental Rotation Test, and self-ratings on the Artistic…

Do prodigies have extraordinary innate talent or do they just start very early and get much practice? Why do relatively few become eminent as adults? Is it because early and later success often need somewhat different abilities and gatekeepers rule? International chess is a good test domain for both issues because it has objective longitudinal…