Conceptions of Giftedness

What does it really mean to be gifted and how can schools or other institutions identify, teach, and evaluate the performance of gifted children? The second edition of Conceptions of Giftedness describes the major conceptions of what it means to be gifted, and how these conceptions apply to identification, instruction, and assessment of the gifted. It will provide specialists with a critical evaluation of various theories of giftedness, give practical advice to teachers and administrators on how to put theories of gifted education into practice, and to enable the major researchers in the field to compare and contrast the strengths of their theoretical models.

Robert J. Sternberg, Ph.D., is IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale, Director of the PACE Center at Yale, and was the 2003 President of the American Psychological Association. He is the author of over 1000 publications on topics related to cognition and intelligence. He has won numerous awards from professional associations and holds five honorary doctorates.

Janet E. Davidson is Associate Professor of Psychology at Lewis & Clark College, where she won the Professor of the Year award in 1997. She does research on several aspects of giftedness, including the roles that insight and metacognitive skils play in gifted problem solving performance. In 1988, she won a Mensa Education and Research Foundation Award for Excellence.