INTEGRATING Gifted Education into the Total School Curriculum

School Administrator, April, 1995 by Carolyn R. Cooper

The well-documented problem of boredom that besets highly able children in regular classrooms is ignored and the basic need of all youth at all ability levels for challenging learning experiences is forgotten.

New Insights

From at least five major research and theoretical developmental projects of the past decade, we have learned that the single, global approach to assessing human abilities with intelligence or aptitude tests does not provide sufficient information to understand children's talents or abilities as a prelude and guide to providing appropriate instruction.

Major insights about the development of human talent came first and foremost from the project carried out by Benjamin S. Bloom, author of the 1985 book Developing Talent in Young People, in which human talents in psychomotor, aesthetic, and mathematics-science areas were studied through the years of early development up through world-class achievement by age 35. The results of that project show clearly that early awareness of specific talents on the part of child, parents, and teachers plays a significant role in the talent development process, probably by providing focus for efforts to develop talent.

Howard Gardner's publication of Frames of Mind in 1983 also has had a powerful impact on our thinking about human abilities. The seven intelligences--linguistic, spatial, musical, bodily kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, intrapersonal, and interpersonal--now constitute a new approach to human abilities that recognizes a diversity of potential talents.

Gardner acknowledges that multiple intelligence theory "has not been subjected to strong empirical tests within psychology," but wisely concludes "that many talents, if not intelligences, are overlooked nowadays; individuals with these talents are the chief casualties of the single-minded, single-funneled approach to the mind."

The publication in 1985 of Francoys Gagne's new conception of the linkage between genetically determined abilities that emerge early in the life of a child and the later emergence in childhood and adolescence of specific talents constituted a mile-stone for gifted education.

Gagne showed clearly how the effects of school, home-family, and the general environment surrounding and impacting on a child influence the development of specific talents. This new theoretical conception pointed the way to a new orientation in gifted education calling for programs and services that would address the specific talents, strengths, and needs of "gifted" youth. It also renewed the thrust, already in progress then, to shift away from the terminology of "giftedness" toward "talent," "talented," and "talent development."

David H. Feldman's work with prodigies, while limited to the study of children with prodigious capabilities, also highlighted the conception of gifted children as having very specific talents. In a presentation delivered in 1992, Feldman explicated further the relationships among general intelligence, specific skills, and domains of ability. Again the evolving conception is one that focuses on nurturance and development of specific talents.