Controversies in Gifted Education

For many years, teachers and professors have noticed that some students remember better than others, reason better than others, create new ideas better than others. These students have been referred to as gifted in honor of suspected inherited gifts and have been treated as a subgroup requiring different educational services and approaches.

However, there have been many controversies swirling around such students, their nature, their origin, their proper education. Because these points of argument usually take place in an evidence-free environment it is likely that the controversies will continue for some time to come.

The identification of such students had previously been based upon scores on an IQ test, which had the effect of also limiting the number of such students because there were assumptions as to ...