At the 2006 National Association of Gifted Children Conference, a panel presentation addressed the importance of providing gifted children with opportunities to take positive social action through service-learning; this article is a result of that discussion. The Future Problem Solving Program (among others) has a community problem-solving…

The "Brown v. Board of Education" decision provided unrestricted access to educational opportunities for all students. Unfortunately, despite the passing of the 50th anniversary of this landmark decision, academic excellence remains a dream deferred for many Black students when compared to their peers. This disparity, more popularly known as the…

Spiritual intelligence--using a multisensory approach to access one's inner knowledge to solve global problems--can be an integrating theme to engage gifted students in building global awareness in the classroom. This article introduces individuals providing training in higher consciousness and presents examples of strategies to further develop…

This case study research was designed to examine the referral process for Washington Gifted Middle School in Peoria Public School District 150 in Peoria, Illinois. The purpose was to determine if perceptions of fourth wade classroom teachers who recommended students to the school were a contributing factor in the disproportionate number of African…

This book by Sheryn Spencer Waterman follows the bestselling "Handbook on Differentiated Instruction for Middle and High Schools." With numerous examples and strategies, it is an all-inclusive manual on assessing student readiness, interests, learning and thinking styles. It includes examples of: (1) Pre-, Formative and Summative assessments; (2)…

This article presents an interview with Dr. Barbara Clark, a Professor Emeritus of the Charter College of Education, California State University, Los Angeles. She was named California State University, Los Angeles Outstanding Professor of 1978-1979 and was nominated twice for the California State Universities and Colleges Trustees Award for…

Technology is an essential part of young people's lives. Students today are digital natives who cannot remember a time without electronic media and technologies. Children who use the Internet spend 37 percent less time watching television and 16 percent more time with friends and family. The Internet is an excellent resource for differentiating…

Global learning is a student-centered activity in which learners of different cultures use technology to improve their global perspectives while remaining in their home countries. This article examines the use of global learning with gifted students to develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary for world citizenship. We describe a…

Differentiating the curriculum has been a challenging task for classroom teachers, but it has become even more challenging after the No Child Left Behind Act, because the emphasis in programming and funding in schools has shifted from realizing the individual potential of every student to raising all students to the same level of minimum…

Gifted students have unique educational needs. Although gifted students are as varied as other students in terms of their learning styles and preferences, all gifted learners have exhibited unusual performance or potential and they have distinctive characteristics, shared by most of these students, which require effective responses from educators.…

Gifted middle school mathematics students often exhibit boundless energy, a desire to exert some degree of control over their learning, and an ability to think logically and abstractly in ways that astound their parents and teachers. Middle school math curriculum that combines guided investigations of real-life problems with product-based…

Many studies have been conducted on the achievement gap, with most findings pointing to how school and family variables affect Black students' achievement. Another body of work focuses on how social variables (i.e., peers) impact Black students' achievement, including how accusations of "acting White" affect the performance of Black students and…

Can school be structured so that all students are held to high expectations? Can curriculum be designed to find and nurture students with gifted potential from underrepresented populations? Can basic skills be strengthened so that such students can interact, compete, and work with other gifted learners? Young Scholars (YS) is a K-8 model that…

Millennials, which includes persons born between 1982 and 2002, often have been characterized as a mixed bag with two over-arching variables used in describing this population: (1) the diverse nature of the group; and (2) the closeness that exists between them and their parents. In the case of the latter, millennials have a closeness to their…

This paper presented the achievements of the expert performance approach. The 10-year rule of expertise is one of them, a very practical rule. However, the expert performance approach does not answer some important questions directly arising out of its main statements. The cognitive-developmental theory of giftedness can help in this regard…