This article offers some guidance for those first entering the volatile, exciting, and (at times) exasperating field of gifted child education. It provides common denominators that underlie this field of study that typically surface at some point in this career. The following are among the sections included in this brief article: (1) Gifted child…

The spill-over effect is intended to gather support for gifted education by illustrating where and when it can provide meaningfully and successfully for the education of students in other programs. Germane to the spill-over effect is the concept of reciprocity among educational programs or the means by which one program can share content and…

In this article, the authors report on the Operation Houndstooth Intervention Theory (OHIT), which fosters social awareness and utilizes the talents of the gifted to build social capital, that is, a program in which gifted students with high potential use their ability to help others. The six approaches of OHIT are described: (1) The…

The topic of perfectionism is bound to surface when discussing the social and emotional development of gifted children and adolescents. The author has observed gifted and talented fourth graders who have exhibited perfectionism in a myriad of unhealthy ways. She was able to document and categorize the manifestations of perfectionism. In this…

Several studies on cooperative learning suggest that cooperative learning make students develop more higher level reasoning, more frequent generation of new ideas and solutions, and greater transfer of what is learned within one situation to another. Cooperative learning also promotes academic achievement, increases retention, and vastly improves…

It is not difficult in today's political climate to understand that good campaigning is redefining the common language of the times for your own political benefits. There are common threads that weave through political arguments. These common threads are the terms and phrases that take on different meaning for each candidate. They entice the…

The purpose of the current study was to determine the number of gifted students with disabilities identified and served in gifted education programs in the state of Mississippi. Four categories of giftedness are set forth in the regulations for gifted programs are: (1) Intellectually gifted children refers to children and youth who are found to…

"The Boy and the Rose" is a case study of a gifted/talented student and his parents. The names of the family, as well as other people in the study, have been changed to protect their privacy. The facts in the study were gleaned as a result of perusing public and private records and the conducting of personal interviews by the author. In some…

An appropriate education is one that identifies students' educational needs and then provides a curriculum that addresses those needs (Benbow & Stanley, 1996). All students, even those identified as gifted, deserve a personalized education. However, many educators outside gifted education believe that "giftedness" is a fancy label and that gifted…

Gifted underachievement, at first glance, seems like an oxymoron. By implicit definition gifted students are those who have developed high levels of intelligence and consistently perform at these high levels (Clark, 2002). Underachievement, on the other hand, is associated with a failure to do well in school. This seeming mismatch of terms is…

This article presents the author's experiences during a 5-day tour at Reggio Emilia, Italy, that is well known for the phrase, "the hundred languages of children" (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1993). The author saw the infinite ways that children expressed their ideas in each Reggio school being visited. The author found three means…

Currently principals are involved with a variety of programs offered in schools, such as IDEA, English Language Learners, Title I remedial services, migrant education, and gifted and talented programs. However, there is a growing recognition that gifted students are being poorly served by most public schools. The purpose of this study was to…

Many challenging behaviors can be prevented by designing environments that promote children's engagement and teaching children new social skills (Lawry, Danko, & Strain, 1999; Neilsen, Olive, Donovan, & McEvoy, 1999; Strain & Hemmeter, 1999). Fox, Dunlap, Hemmeter, Joseph, and Strain (2003) have described a framework for promoting children's…

The enigmatic author Lemony Snicket is quick to establish from the start that happy events are not to be expected in his collection, "A Series of Unfortunate Events." Every happy event in the lives of the three clever and charming Baudelaire children is countered with an even more unfortunate one, events rife with misery, misfortune, and despair.…

Very young students can begin to use technology to organize and analyze their data in sophisticated ways. The National Center for Education Statistics (2005) reported that 67% of nursery school students and 80% of kindergarten students were using computers in 2003. By the early elementary grades, some of these students are ready to begin using…