In this provocative volume, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Brandon L. Wright argue that, for decades, the United States has done too little to focus on educating students to achieve at high levels. The authors identify two core problems: First, compared to other countries, the United States does not produce enough high achievers. Second, students from…

Competitions are discussed as a measure to foster students' interest, especially for highly gifted and talented students. In the current study, participants of a cognitive school competition in science were compared to non-participants of the same age group (14-15) who either did not participate in any competition or who participated in a…

In the 1940s, Lewis Terman (1954a, 1954b) studied "life success" of 730 gifted men at the midpoint of their careers and found that success is associated with stability and absence of disturbing conflicts. In this article, we use retrospective data (N = 624) from the academic Olympians in 3 countries (USA, Germany, and Finland) to study…

In mathematics, physics, and chemistry, women are still considered to be at a disadvantage. In the present study, the development of the symptoms of learned helplessness was of particular interest. A study involving average and mildly gifted 8th-grade boys and girls (top 60%) investigated whether girls, regardless of ability level, experience…