Search

Education policy signals the level of support or importance for high-performing or gifted and talented students to school leaders, educators, parents, and other stakeholders. These policies communicate the value or goals of departments of education. Given the importance of education policy, there remains a void in the analysis of gifted and talented education policy, which accounts for less than 1% of the empirical literature. We sought to understand how publicly available individual state and territory departments of education's gifted and talented education policies and guidance documents coalesce with the NAGC (2019) Pre-K-Grade 12 Gifted Education Programming Standards. Although not developed for the Australian context, they provide a common index from which to gauge alignment. Results indicated an uneven approach in both policy and guidance and this imbalance exposes opportunity gaps to address the specific learning needs of this student population.

Twitter is a valuable resource for research because of its potential to provide insight into public opinion as well as to identify the most influential sources of information. Mixed-methods exploratory analysis was used to evaluate the discourse on Twitter regarding gifted education. The results of the quantitative analysis of the matrix of connections using NodeXL Pro indicate that gifted education Twitter is a cohesive network and that the top influencers are organizations and educational consultants. Sentiment analysis using Linguistics Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015, Pennebaker et al., 2015) software indicates that tweets related to gifted education have a mix of positive and negative emotive tone. The qualitative analyses suggest that gifted education professionals and parents engage in Twitter in similar ways to what has been described in past research: to share interesting articles and videos, to discuss current issues, promote one's ideas, and seek opportunities.

Schools exist to educate, yet the emphasis on age-based, grade-level standards fails to account for the wide range of academic readiness that exists in every classroom. Special education programs exist to meet student needs; gifted education should be no different. The authors, all gifted education researchers, present a vision for a model of gifted education that is aligned with Response to Intervention and personalized learning. At its heart, it is concerned with addressing the real-time academic needs of every student, with the ultimate goal of maximizing the learning of every student.

The ongoing debate surrounding special schools and inclusive education in Australia has come to the forefront since the recommendations of the 2023 Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, where the Commissioners were split on the implementation of full educational inclusion and the elimination of special schools. The authors discuss the controversy surrounding segregated special education classes and schools, particularly considering the push for full inclusion. The concept of inclusion is examined through a brief review of national and international policies and academic and popular literature, including how the inclusion continuum is conceptualized by policymakers, academics, and families. Stakeholder perspectives on the complexities and challenges of implementing full inclusion in mainstream school settings offer differing experiences and opinions on what is possible. Lastly, by examining the nuances of the special school controversy, the authors provide recommendations on how best to meet the educational needs of all students, across the spectrum of abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1988, Van Galen proposed two distinct categories to describe homeschooling parents -- ideologues and pedagogues. Her model has been widely cited in the homeschooling literature. In the 30 years since the introduction of these identifiers, homeschooling in the United States has experienced tremendous growth due to a number of intersecting contextual and societal events, which suggests a need to re-examine Van Galen's initial binary categories. Education reform, enacted through standards-based curriculum and assessment, school choice presented as a mechanism to improve the educational experiences of the country's most vulnerable students, greater acceptance of homeschooling as a legitimate school choice, and the diversification of families choosing homeschooling as an alternative to traditional forms of K-12 schooling have all contributed to homeschooling's explosive growth and a corresponding need to revisit homeschooling's conceptual framework. This article proposes an enhanced framework for defining homeschooling, which better reflects the "what of school" and "how of schooling" that contemporary homeschooling families employ.

Gifted education as a field of research in Australia is relatively young when compared with its North American counterparts. A reflection of how the field of gifted education has developed from 1983 to 2017 in this context allows for observations of previous research and current trends, and how these may influence future directions for the field. Empirical research published in peer-reviewed journals is one metric that can be used to undertake this reflection, including the individuals responsible for the research, the setting where the research is undertaken, and outlets where resulting findings are published, as well as the research themes that dominate research agendas. Longitudinally, these metrics are part of the narrative that construct Australian gifted education. Reflecting on how the field developed provides an understanding of how research and practice have evolved and what future research and innovations are possible.