Paradigms of Gifted Education: A Guide for Theory-Based, Practice-Focused Research

This book highlights how to conduct research in gifted education when researchers have to choose from myriad theoretical ideas, hypotheses, claims, practical models, and strategies. It shows researchers how to build clarity, rigor, and relevance into a research agenda that combats fragmentation and contributes to enhanced theoretical and practical endeavors in the field. Specifically, Paradigms of Gifted Education advocates a paradigmatic approach to conducting research in gifted education and shows how it can be done every step of the way by specifying the essential questions of What?, Why?, Who?, and How? in a coherent manner, and by selecting methods that are appropriate for the question asked and the phase of the research efforts. To facilitate the development of a research agenda, the book identifies three major paradigms of gifted education and 20 essential research questions that would help move the field forward.

David Yun Dai, Ph.D., is an associate professor of educational psychology and methodology at University at Albany, State University of New York, and a Zijiang Lecture Professor of Education and Psychology at East China Normal University. He was the recipient of the Early Scholar Award in 2006 conferred by the National Association for Gifted Children and a Fulbright Scholar to China during 2008-2009. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Gifted Child Quarterly, Journal for the Education of the Gifted, and Roeper Review. He has published seven authored or edited books and more than 70 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews in general psychology, educational psychology, and gifted education.

Fei Chen is a Ph.D. student in the educational psychology and methodology program at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research interests include self-regulated learning, learning from instruction and assessment, and gifted education.