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This article describes a case study of a group of ten 14-year-old students who engaged with an online extended-learning project as an extracurricular activity for about 6 months. The students were physically located in Australia, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom. The facilitation and online learning made use of a progressive pedagogy that moved from structured, whole group online participation to a more individual, open approach to learning. The study investigated students’ motivation to participate in the online learning and explored the nature of the interactions in an online learning environment. The findings show that students interacted differently online, depending on the task at hand. Seven of the 10 students completed the final task of creating learning products. The implications of the study for online learning with high-ability school students are discussed.

Putting the Research to Use

This research demonstrates that online support for high ability students is both possible and practical. Implementing this approach requires a structured approach to move the students progressively to more open-ended enquiry. This incremental approach reduces the extent of student drop-out and increases task completion when compared to more challenging open-ended tasks. Teachers or schools seeking to provide this kind of support to overcome geographic isolation of high ability students need to (a) plan carefully for the structured engagement with topics and with other students (b) remain closely involved in the initial stages of engagement and (c) only gradually remove their scaffolding as students demonstrate capacity to sustain independent interactions. Having a public purpose for the activity is also important.

With the prevalence of gifted students in general education classrooms, all teachers will be responsible for providing appropriate programming for them, resulting in a need for training in the education of the gifted to be introduced at the preservice level. In this study, the researchers investigated the effectiveness of a combined intervention strategy for preservice teachers, consisting of a course in the education of the gifted and an accompanying 9-week practicum, in increasing participants’ understanding of the characteristics and needs of gifted students. Through semistructured interviews, participants’ perceptions of the effects the interventions had on their understanding of gifted students’ characteristics and needs were examined. The findings from the interviews were triangulated with classroom observations, lesson plans, and participant responses to the Survey of Practices with Students of Varying Needs. Participants perceived an increase in their understanding of the needs and characteristics of gifted students through participation in the interventions as well as increased confidence in their general teaching abilities. Implications of the study for teacher education and future research are discussed.

This article presents findings from a national survey of 149 practicing school counselors who are members of the American School Counselor Association. The survey gathered information on school counselors’ perceptions of and experiences with acceleration as a program option for gifted students. Results indicate that, although school counselors’ opinions are being solicited in decision making regarding acceleration, they do not possess training and accurate information regarding acceleration. Hence, training and professional development focusing on the research-based practices of acceleration are needed to ensure that school counselors give accurate advice and guidance concerning gifted students’ education. Future research is needed to compare and contrast the effectiveness of accelerative decision making between school counselors who are trained and untrained in acceleration programmatic options.

Putting the Research to Use

School counselors are ubiquitous to schools and it is expected that they will assume an important role in the academic planning of students. In addition, they are looked to for consultation on the social and emotional development of students and how these dimensions may help or hinder academic choices. This study indicates that school counselors are prominent in the academic and social issues of gifted students when it comes to the issue of acceleration. Parents and educators do look to counselors for information and perspective regarding acceleration and counselors do provide their perspective. Also, acceleration has become a more prominent option for gifted students in schools. Unfortunately, the information and perspectives of school counselors on acceleration is not based on formal training and familiarity with the research but on informal information and limited knowledge of the research. School counselors are not well prepared to fulfill their role in helping parents, educators and students make sound decisions regarding acceleration. This study makes it clear that there is need for formal training of school counselors in the research and practice of acceleration both at the preservice and inservice levels. School counselors should participate in acceleration decisions because they bring a general and comprehensive understanding of the student. However, they need a specific understanding of acceleration in order to be effective in such decisions.

Despite their importance, there has been surprisingly little scholarly examination of the NAGC Pre-K --Grade 12 Gifted Program Standards (NAGC, 2008/2000; Landrum, Callahan, & Shaklee, 2001) since their publication a decade ago. As part of a larger study investigating the effectiveness of local policies developed within the framework of state law, we used a qualitative approach to examine the ‘minimum’ and ‘exemplary’ criteria from the Student Identification portion of these NAGC Standards. Through this process we developed a 27-item checklist, which we then used to evaluate 43 locally developed plans for identifying diverse gifted learners from one large state in the southeastern United States. Based on this experience, we identify the strengths and weaknesses that we encountered in using the Standards for this purpose. We provide the checklist items we developed, and we offer specific suggestions for how the Gifted Program Standards in their currently ongoing revision process might be made more user-friendly for practitioners to apply toward effective evaluation of gifted program documents.

Putting the Research to Use

Our experience in using the Student Identification portion of the NAGC Pre-K --Grade 12 Gifted Program Standards highlights some difficulties in using a national standards document directly to evaluate district-level program descriptions and policies. Specifically, we found three aspects that hindered the application of the Student Identification framework to the evaluation of local policies: 1) A standard identified as Exemplary could be met in some cases without first satisfying the Minimum requirement of the same numbered standard; 2) Some standards included more than one criterion within a single numbered standard, and district documents satisfied one but not all of these criteria; and 3) The lack of consensus on terminology led to the use of some words such as "screening" to mean different things in the NAGC Standards than in the district documents, while other terms were too broad (such as "culturally fair") or too narrow to prove useful in evaluating plan quality.

The responsibility for developing and implementing policies and procedures often rests at the local level. Consequently, we believe that practitioners will find a checklist such as the one we have developed and presented here to be a useful bridge between the language and aims of standards documents and the tangible goals of those who develop and implement policies within the framework of state rules. We suggest that the currently ongoing revisions to these NAGC Standards should consider our findings in the three areas described above, and we recommend continued support for the development of ancillary materials as has been provided for these and other national standards documents.

This article discusses the original development and subsequent updates and revisions made to the Teacher Observation Form (TOF). The TOF is a 12-item form to be used by evaluators in the observation of teachers of gifted and talented students. After nearly 25 years of use, the original TOF was revised based on input from content experts and modified to reflect current effective standards of practices in gifted education. The revised TOF was then used on 217 occasions over a 2-year period to evaluate teachers in university-based enrichment programs. Results indicated that alpha reliability estimates increased for 9 of the 12 TOF items and that the overall rater-level effect (intraclass correlation coefficient) was comparable with that of classroom-level effects in standardized test scores. Based on these findings the authors offer the TOF as a means to provide feedback to teachers as to the prevalence of gifted education pedagogical effective practices in their classrooms.

There is international concern about falling enrollments in higher education, particularly the sciences, by gifted students. In this mixed methods study, the top-performing 200 students (approximately 2%) within a particular education jurisdiction at the beginning of their first year at university were surveyed, and 20 interviewed about their school experiences using a biographical interpretive design. This study focused on identifying those characteristics of teachers that supported students’ interests. Participants identified seven characteristics of teachers that students identified as supportive of their potential career pathways. These included connecting pedagogical practices with student interests, being passionate about their subject matter, having good content knowledge, making learning experiences relevant, setting high expectations of students, being a good explainer of complex ideas, and being a good classroom manager. This study extends our knowledge of how teachers influence gifted students and has implications for both preservice and in-service teacher education and career counseling.

This study supported the use of acceleration for gifted minority students in math. The gifted minority students in this study viewed taking accelerated math courses as exciting and beneficial for preparation for high school and college and particularly liked the challenges they encountered while taking advanced classes. They enjoyed working ahead and having a "leg up" in school and were infused with a special feeling of being gifted and talented in taking accelerated math. Ethnicity was not a major factor for teachers’ support for acceleration. The teachers believed that acceleration provides necessary challenges for students, makes them committed to schoolwork, and enhances their academic achievement. No negative peer pressure resulting from academic acceleration was found, though the teachers were more certain than the students about the existence of negative peer culture for gifted minority students.

In education, most naturally occurring data are clustered within contexts. Students are clustered within classrooms, classrooms are clustered within schools, and schools are clustered within districts. When people are clustered within naturally occurring organizational units such as schools, classrooms, or districts, the responses of people from the same cluster are likely to exhibit some degree of relatedness with each other. The use of hierarchical linear modeling allows researchers to adjust for and model this non-independence. Furthermore, it may be of great substantive interest to try to understand the degree to which people from the same cluster are similar to each other and then to try to identify variables that help us to understand differences both within and across clusters. In HLM, we endeavor to understand and explain between- and within-cluster variability of an outcome variable of interest. We can also use predictors at both the individual level (level 1), and the contextual level (level 2) to explain the variance in the dependent variable. This article presents a simple example using a real data set and walk through the interpretation of a simple hierarchical linear model to illustrate the utility of the technique.