Definitions and Conceptions of Giftedness

Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He formerly was IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale. His BA is from Yale summa cum laude and his PhD is from Stanford. He also holds 13 honorary doctorates. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sternberg has been cited over 150,000 times and is among the most frequently cited authors in psychology textbooks. He is the winner of the APS Williams James Award and the APS James McKeen Cattell Award and of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology. He is married to Karin Sternberg and has five children: Seth, Sara, Samuel, Brittany, and Melody. Sally M. Reis is a professor and the department head of the Educational Psychology Department at the University of Connecticut where she also serves as principal investigator of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. She was a teacher for 15 years, 11 of which were spent working with gifted students on the elementary, junior high, and high school levels. She has authored more than 130 articles, 9 books, 40 book chapters, and numerous monographs and technical reports. Her research interests are related to special populations of gifted and tal-ented students, including: students with learning disabilities, gifted females and diverse groups of talented students. She is also interested in extensions of the Schoolwide Enrichment Model for both gifted and talented students and as a way to expand offerings and provide general enrichment to identify talents and potentials in students who have not been previously identified as gifted. She has traveled extensively conducting workshops and providing profes-sional development for school districts on gifted education, enrichment programs, and talent development programs. She is co-author of The Schoolwide Enrichment Model, The Secondary Triad Model, Dilemmas in Talent Development in the Middle Years, and a book published in 1998 about women's talent development titled Work Left Undone: Choices and Compromises of Talented Females. Sally serves on several editorial boards, including the Gifted Child Quarterly, and is a past president of the National Association for Gifted Children.

About the Editors Series Introduction - Sally M. Reis Introduction to Definitions and Conceptions of Giftedness - Robert J. Sternberg 1. The Nature of Giftedness and Talent - A. Harry Passow 2. What Do We Mean by Giftedness? A Pentagonal Implicit Theory - Robert J. Sternberg, Li-fang Zhang 3. Moving Into the Mainstream? Reflections on the Study of Giftedness - Nancy Ewald Jackson 4. Metacognition, Intelligence and Giftedness - Bruce M. Shore, Arlene C. Dover 5. Divergent Thinking, Creativity and Giftedness - Mark A. Runco 6. Wisdom as a Form of Giftedness - Robert J. Sternberg 7. Giftedness and Talent: Reexamining a Reexamination of the Definitions - Francoys Gagne 8. Profiles of the Gifted and Talented - George T. Betts, Maureen Neihart 9. Childhood Traits and Environmental Conditions of Highly Eminent Adults - Herbert J. Walberg, Shiow-Ling Tsai, Thomas Weinstein, Cynthia L. Gabriel, Sue Pinzur Rasher, Teresa Rosecrans, Evangelina Rovai, Judith Ide, Miguel Trujillo, and Peter Vukosavich 10. Developmental Potential of the Gifted - Michael M. Piechowski, Nicholas Colangelo 11. Child Prodigies: A Distinctive Form of Giftedness - David Henry Feldman 12. A Developmental View of Giftedness - Frances Degen Horowitz 13. Wherefore Art Thou, Multiple Intelligences? Alternative Assessments for Identifying Talent in Ethnically Diverse and Low Income Students - Jonathan A. Plucker, Carolyn M. Callahan, and Ellen M. Tomchin Index