The commentaries in this special issue as well as the articles they address contribute to the knowledge base about advanced learners, how they are identified, and how they are best served. In our Editors' commentary, we have organized our thoughts following the same order in which the commentaries appear in the remainder of this issue. As the…

Using data from a large southwestern school district, Bui, Craig, and Imberman investigated the effects of gifted and talented programming on middle school students' achievement and behavior (attendance and discipline) through two avenues. Using a regression discontinuity design for the first set of analyses, the authors took advantage of a…

Focus Group interviews with 31 disadvantaged students in an Early College High School (ECHS) program present insights to students' experience in the hybrid school, specifically regarding their perceptions of college readiness. Student "voice" in research can yield significant information when examining aspects of school design that…

States and districts are under increasing pressure to evaluate the effectiveness of their teachers and to ensure that all students receive high-quality instruction. This article describes some of the challenges associated with current effectiveness approaches, including paper-and-pencil tests of pedagogical content knowledge, classroom observation…

Academic learning and creativity should be overlapping goals that can be simultaneously pursued in programs of advanced academics. However, efforts aimed at nurturing creativity and academic learning sometimes are represented as two related but separate paths; this separation is unnecessary and can undermine the development of creative and…

The problem of achievement gaps among different subgroups of students has been evident in education for many years. This manuscript revisits the work of renowned educator Benjamin S. Bloom, who saw reducing gaps in the achievement of various groups of students as a simple problem of reducing variation in student learning outcomes. Bloom observed…

A national literacy professional development project reduced the achievement gap for students experiencing difficulties in reading or writing in 91 of New Zealand's schools. It was based on two premises: coherence within and between the multiple levels of the schooling and educational administration systems, and a focus on evidence-informed…