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Starting from an appreciation of history, this article considers aspects on developing cognitive excellence in the context of core tensions and themes surrounding gifted education that continue to be relevant to present scholarship and society. We discuss some of the knowns and unknowns regarding cognitive talent development in the context of history, research methods, policy, and politics with a focus on the intersection between the fields of gifted education and cognitive aptitudes in the U.S. with novel considerations for advances in methodology.

When seeking to explain the eventual outcomes of a higher education experience, do the personal attributes and background factors students bring to college matter more than what the college is able to contribute to the development of the student through education or other institutional factors? Most education studies tend to simply ignore cognitive aptitudes and other student characteristics--in particular the long history of research on this topic--since the focus is on trying to assess the impact of education. Thus, the role of student characteristics has in many ways been underappreciated in even highly sophisticated quantitative education research. Conversely, educational and institutional factors are not as prominent in studies focused on cognitive aptitudes, as these fields focus first on reasoning capacity, and secondarily on other factors. We examine the variance in student outcomes due to student (e.g., cognitive aptitudes) versus institutional characteristics (e.g., teachers, schools). At the level of universities, two contemporary U.S. datasets are used to examine the proportion of variance accounted for in various university rankings and long-run salary by student cognitive characteristics and institutional factors. We find that depending upon the ways the variables are entered into regression models, the findings are somewhat different. We suggest some fruitful paths forward which might integrate the methods and findings showing that teachers and schools matter, along with the broader developmental bounds within which these effects take place.

Fully developing the talents of all students is a fundamental goal for personal well-being and development and ultimately for global societal innovation and flourishing. However, in this paper we focus on what we believe is an often neglected and underdeveloped population, that of the gifted. We draw from the cognitive aptitude and gifted education research literatures to make the case that solutions to consequential real-world problems can be greatly enhanced by more fully developing the talents of the intellectually gifted population, which we operationalize in this paper as roughly the top 5% of cognitive talent. Should well-supported high achievers choose to solve them, these problems span health, science, economic growth, and areas unforeseen. We draw from longitudinal research on intellectually precocious students and retrospective research on leaders and innovators in society, showing that mathematical, verbal, and spatial aptitudes are linked to societal innovation. We then discuss two remaining fundamental challenges: the identification of disadvantaged and marginalized groups of students who have traditionally been neglected in selection for gifted programming suited to their current developmental needs, and the building of skills beyond academic ones, specifically in the related areas of open-minded thinking and intellectual humility.

Considers multidisciplinary perspectives as a lens through which to view gifted education research. In the spirit of scholars who have also sought to ask field strengthening questions to help improve scientific advance, we address four questions and encourage other scholars from all disciplines to ask their own questions: (1) What if the field is much larger than we think it is? (2) What if the field is less intellectually diverse than we think it is? (3) What if the evidence supporting the efficacy of gifted programming is not as strong as we think it is? and (4) What if gifted learners may actually be okay even if they are not fully challenged? After reviewing evidence supporting (and failing to support) the core idea behind each of these questions (with a U. S. focus and for academically-gifted students in more academic domains) we conclude with ideas about continuing to ask field strengthening questions to improve research. We should explore questions and ideas and established findings from disciplines outside gifted and try to make gifted a more multidisciplinary field by being open to learning from other ways of approaching knowledge through a plurality of methods and disciplinary perspectives.

To understand why education as a field has not incorporated intelligence, we must consider the field's history and culture. Accordingly, in this cross-disciplinary collaboration between a political scientist who studies institutions and a psychologist who studies intelligence, we outline how the roots of contemporary American Educational Leadership as a field determine its contemporary avoidance of the concept of intelligence. Rooted in early 20th century progressivism and scientific management, Educational Leadership theory envisions professionally run schools as "Taylorist" factories with teaching and leadership largely standardized, prioritizing compliance over cognitive ability among educators. Further, the roots of modern education theory do not see the intelligence of students as largely malleable. Hence, prioritizing intelligence is viewed as elitist. For more than a century, these assumptions have impacted recruitment into education as a profession. We conclude with ideas about how to bring intelligence into mainstream schooling, within the existing K-12 education institutional context. We believe that better integration of intelligence and broader individual differences research in education policy and practice would lead to more rapid advances to finding evidence based solutions to help children.

Despite intelligence research being among the most replicable bodies of empirical findings--a Rosetta stone across the social sciences--the communication of intelligence research with non-intelligence researchers and the public remains a challenge, especially given ongoing public controversies throughout the history of the field. Hunt argued that "we have a communication problem." This article is a call for intelligence researchers to consider communication at multiple levels--communication with other intelligence researchers, communication with non-intelligence researchers, and communication with the public, defined here as policymakers, practitioners, students, and general readers. It discusses ongoing tensions between academic freedom and social responsibility and provides suggestions for thinking about communication and effective research translation and implementation of intelligence research from the frameworks of science and policy research communication. It concludes with some recommendations for effective communication and stresses the importance of incentivizing more scholars to responsibly seek to educate and engage with multiple publics about the science of intelligence.

When you drive past any American school, you'll see signs telling you to reduce your speed and declaring the area to be a 'drug-free zone,' with draconian penalties for violators. [...]

The Marland Report included many correct observations about gifted education. Some findings, for example, were based on Project Talent, a large-scale population representative longitudinal study of the US high school population. This paper uses the intersection of cognitive aptitudes and gifted education as a framework and synthesizes studies using prospective longitudinal data from numerous sources. Additional retrospective data on US high achievers are reviewed, as are longitudinal findings from other countries. All these sources will be used to reevaluate a selected set of claims made in the Marland Report. Specifically, we explore (a) the definition and understanding of gifted students; (b) the identification of and longitudinal research on gifted students; and (c) we briefly discuss the context of the Marland Report in the wider history of education policy and reform in the US, including how to best support talented students using information from the field of education policy.

We examined the state of Arkansas, empirically testing how focusing on high-achieving students using state tests might expand the pool of gifted identified students. From a broader sample of 173,133 students, we compared the degree to which students who were academically talented in the top 5% on third-grade state literacy and math assessments were identified as gifted in Arkansas. Across five independent cohorts, we replicated the finding that roughly 30% of the students in the top 5% on both third-grade literacy and math were not identified as gifted. Logistic regression (N = 3992) indicated that high-achieving students participating in the federal Free/Reduced Lunch program were 50% less likely to be identified. These findings suggest that using state math and literacy assessments as universal screening tools could improve gifted identification of high-achieving students, many from low-income or other disadvantaged backgrounds.