This report proposes a modification of Jean Piaget's concept of "creative abstraction," the mechanism of creative thought, which develops both intelligence and creative ideas. By reflecting on one's actions and the coordinations of actions, the individual constructs new relationships, links, rules, or correspondences between and among them.…

Deductive reasoning problems were presented to 72 public elementary school students, half of whom were identified as gifted (mean age of 9.6 years) and half of whom were regular education students (mean age of 9.3 years). They were used to test an hypothesis that gifted children who score significantly higher than average on standardized…

Systematic observations of thousands of high school students in the California Mentally Gifted Minors/Gifted and Talented Education programs identified five principles underlying the development of high level thinking skills in this population: (1) Exceptional performance on any criterion requires mutually reinforcing antecedents, the effects of…

Mathematically gifted boys (N=77) and girls (N=62) completed a mathematics reasoning test, a verbal reasoning test, a measure of spatial ability, and a personality test. Findings indicated that boys not only have higher mathematical reasoning ability than girls, but also that this ability is the single best predictor of their mathematical…

Panoramic scanning is the capacity to perceive, interpret, and appreciate complex problems from a big-picture vantage point. Barriers to panoramic scanning (sensory bombardment, superficial polarized thought, and tunnel vision) and facilitators (broad interests and knowledge, pattern finding, and connection-making skills) are identified. Educators…

The study examined methods of mathematical problem solving with 34 gifted and 34 average Dutch 10 year olds. Typical questioning protocols are diagrammed and results tabulated. Preliminary findings suggest the potential value of explicit teaching of advanced mathematical problem-solving skills to pupils of average ability. (DB)

This study examined the transition from concrete to formal operations in very bright children in an effort to determine whether high ability in concrete operations would carry over into formal operational ability, and also to investigate precocity in regard to formal operations. Subjects were 38 white middle-class children ranging in age from…

After participating in a 4-week demonstration project focusing on enriching skills in cognition, memory, convergent and divergent thinking, creativity, and problem solving, 68 potentially gifted 4- and 5- year-olds (many from culturally-diverse and/or low socioeconomic backgrounds) made significant gains in their ability to reason with figures and…

This bulletin offers guidelines to help parents and teachers improve the thinking skills of gifted children. It stresses the importance of encouraging thinking through the use of evocative questions, distinguishes between and defines critical thinking and creative thinking, and offers suggested questions to prompt either creative/divergent…

This digest considers the role of personal computers in the education of gifted students. There is evidence that students are working "smarter," whether they are learning and using more information, understanding key concepts and relationships better, or developing higher level thinking skills. Research findings concerning the specific…

Thirty-seven normal and 33 gifted children from kindergarten classes and 26 retarded children from special classes with mean mental ages of 76 months, 80 months, and 72 months respectively, were initially tested for their understanding of the terms more, same, and less. All who had failed conservation of substance pretests using juice, sand, clay,…

The effects of age and intelligence levels upon word associations were studied in 96 intellectually retarded, normal, and superior children with IQ's of 65 to 80, 91 to 110, and 117 to 158 respectively. A word association and a word usage task (reliability coefficients of .91 and .98) called for homogeneous responses to six form classes--count…