Domains of Talent

Domains of talent refers to the specific areas in which a person may excel. Benjamin Bloom described talent as “an unusually high level of demonstrated ability, achievement or skill in some special field of study or interest” (p. 5). In Bloom's early work at the University of Chicago, researchers attempted to investigate distinct domains of talent in order to identify critical factors in the development of talent. The research team selected only four of literally hundreds of domains to study: athletic/psychomotor; aesthetic/musical/artistic; cognitive/intellectual; and interpersonal. Bloom's team selected these four domains because of the interrelationship between and among them as well as the spectrum of domains, and attempted to identify the ways in which talent develops in a domain. Early in the study the team dropped the interpersonal domain because no clearly identifiable criteria could be established in the field to identify persons who were considered extraordinarily talented in the interpersonal domain. Bloom and his colleagues focused primarily on the middle of the population, hypothesizing that those in that group, under favorable learning conditions, could develop unusually high levels of demonstrated ability achievement or skill in some special field of study or interest.

Lauren Sosniak, a researcher in the Chicago group, identified three phases of learning that influence the development of the talent domain. The earliest phase of development described is when young children demonstrate an interest or curiosity for a particular talent that is encouraged by parents and others through informal play and exploration of the talent. Sosniak describes the second phase of development as a more formal disciplined approach to the talent domain that is facilitated by parents and expert others to focus on the details of the talent domain: the techniques, structures, vocabulary, and connections. This phase is also characterized by respect and reciprocity between the student and teacher as well as recognition of the student's talent in more formal ways (e.g., recitals, competitions). In the final phase of talent development, students begin the process of personalizing their talent. In this period of development they begin to work with other professionals in their talent domain to gain increasing levels of expertise. A hallmark of this period for those who become recognized at the highest levels of their field is the personalization of their talent, working from mastery of technique to giving personal meaning to their talent. It is also at this point that researchers noted that students who could not make the shift to personal meaning began to realize that although they would always be proficient in their area of talent, it was unlikely to manifest itself at the highest levels in their field. Among the conclusions of this work was that exceptional levels of talent development require certain types of environmental support, special experiences, excellent teachers, and appropriate motivational encouragement at each phase of development.

Another major researcher in the field, Francoys Gagné, described domains of talent as the advanced mastery of systematically developed abilities and knowledge in at least one field of human endeavor to a degree that places a child's achievement within at least the upper 15 percent of age peers who are active in that field. Gagné's differentiated model of giftedness and talent proposes five aptitude domains: intellectual, creative, socioaffective, sensorimotor, and “others” (e.g., extrasensory perception). Further, Gagné contends that talents progressively emerge from the transformation of these aptitudes into the well-trained and systematically developed skills of a particular field.

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