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The Peterson Proactive Developmental Attention model (PPDA) offers a framework for understanding and addressing social and emotional concerns of high-ability students. This manuscript focuses on the developmental component, with emphasis on academic underachievement, with explanations and guidance for applying the developmental aspect of the PPDA model in school programs for bright students, in counseling, and at home. This article explores how an emphasis on the development of underachievers, in contrast with underachievement, can engage them and the adults who are invested in them in mutual learning about life in the present -- for the sake of both present and future wellbeing.

This article discusses issues that emerged from conducting professional development activities for educators during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, as post-academic educational trainers, the authors worked closely with more than 200 professional educators who participated in an international diploma program to develop their professional skills and gain positive and insightful experience. Here, they share three lessons they learned while working with professional educators: (a) teachers face new challenges in the use of educational technology, (b) teachers wonder how to motivate learners with diverse abilities in a virtual setting, and (c) building a supportive community is essential. Suggestions and recommendations are also provided.

From a developmental perspective, gifted girls could benefit from the life experience shared by gifted women about what influenced them to make life choices. This study focuses on Dutch gifted women to explore what were facilitating or hindering factors in making those decisions in education, personal life, and career. Interviews with 10 participants, from ages 18 to 62, provided in-depth descriptions of participants' personal experiences. They clearly stated what they wanted to achieve and how, whether it was in school, career, or in personal life. Overall, this study is in line with previous research. When making career choices, gifted women valued intrinsic motivation, differentiation, and the quality of the work. When they made choices, significant adults, a supportive partner, and active behaviours in seeking guidance were helping factors whereas the feeling of being different, lack of suitable education, and others' judgment were hindering factors. Some implications are also given.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relations between gender roles, career self-efficacy, and career development of STEM gifted girls in high schools and universities in Taiwan, from a developmental perspective. It includes two studies. In Study 1, 473 gifted girls from eight high schools in Taiwan participated, and, based on a self-reported survey, the results indicated 52.5% possessed neutral characteristics and it also implied that they simultaneously possessed masculine and feminine characteristics. Meanwhile, the higher the social gender-role awareness and career self-efficacy, the better was that individual's career development. However, when compared to gifted girls in language/social sciences, the career self-efficacy and career development of STEM gifted girls was significantly lower. Later, 70 gifted girls continually participated in Study 2, on a voluntary basis. We found that although STEM gifted girls had their own goals and direction when it came to universities, the higher they are in the education stage, the lower the career self-efficacy and lower science learning interest they may have. This would have a certain degree of impact on their subsequent career development. Thus, a well-designed career program and mentorship for gifted girls are needed to address the current issue.

The editorial in the Journal of Advanced Academics discusses the importance of trustworthiness in qualitative research. It emphasizes the need for qualitative data to be rich, descriptive, and powerful, not seen as a limitation. The editorial provides guidance on elements of trustworthiness such as confirmability, credibility, dependability, and transferability, and highlights the significance of aligning trustworthiness choices with research paradigms and theoretical perspectives. It also encourages researchers to use diverse viewpoints and strategies to promote methodological integrity in qualitative research. [Extracted from the article]

The purpose of this article is to introduce the development of nanotechnology education in Taiwan using the example of evidenced-based lessons. Combining with the interest in STEM and gifted education, the goals were to cultivate teachers' capacity to teach new technology, to enhance K-12 high-ability students' interests and understanding of basic science, and to produce innovations in future industrial and technological development. In the "K-12 Nano Tech project", a 5E instructional model was applied in both theory and practice in science. We used the "lotus effect" lesson of nanoscience education for elementary high-ability students as an example, and there were 28 elementary school students in the enrichment program. The evaluation results showed positive learning outcomes and students expressed that they enjoyed the activities. The work, supported with age-appropriate and well-planned lessons, provides high-ability students the opportunity to learn advanced concepts with STEM curriculum.

Summer enrichment and residential programs can provide gifted students with positive social interactions and challenging curricula. However, little research has focused on gifted students' perceptions of the learning environment in such programs. This research project evaluated the psychometric properties and practical applications of the "Student Perceptions of Classroom Quality" ("SPOCQ") instrument. The two studies used a total sample of 1,492 diverse, gifted students in Grades 5 through 12 who participated in a university-based enrichment residential program from 2010 through 2013. Confirmatory factor analysis results indicated that although the original model was a moderately good fit for the gifted student participants in 2010 to 2011, some items on the "SPOCQ" were classroom specific and did not apply to residential programs. Therefore, those items were revised and retested, and results showed that the modified model was a better fit for gifted student participants in 2012 to 2013.

The Peterson Proactive Developmental Attention (PPDA) model offers a framework for affective curriculum for gifted children and adolescents and for both formal or informal interaction with individuals. The model was developed in authentic clinical and educational settings in response to perceived needs but was also informed by considerable research focused on the social and emotional development of gifted youth. The proactive, developmental, and attention components are explained here, and findings from three studies of the model attest to its usefulness. The model is adaptable to a wide age range and can enhance communication across achievement levels, cultural groups, and socioeconomic levels. The small- and large-group applications can be facilitated by laypersons with brief training.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how high-ability students experienced their participation in an affective curriculum through small-group discussions in a diverse, university-based, summer enrichment program for talented youth. The investigation included two closely related studies. The first study included 77 high-ability students from several cultures and economic backgrounds who participated in the 2014 summer program. The second was a retrospective study with 24 Native American students from Diné, Ojibwe, and Lakota tribes who had participated in the affective curriculum in 2013 to determine if their participation had any longer term effects on this subgroup. In general, the students from all backgrounds in both studies said the small-group discussions enriched their overall program experience. Twenty-two of the 24 Native American students from the three tribes who participated in the retrospective study reported that they believed they had changed their behaviors during the past year because of their participation in the small-group discussions the previous summer. The changes mentioned most by these students were exhibiting stronger self-confidence and being more open to people. The results of this study suggests that the affective intervention was regarded positively. It provided both short- and long-term benefits to the high-ability students who participated in the program.

A search of the literature, from 1984 to 2015, revealed that only 17 empirical studies of direct affective intervention with high-ability students exist in the field of gifted education. These selective 17 studies, with the justifiable data published alongside them, were analyzed. Five major findings included. First, there is a need for more empirical studies of the direct affective interventions in the field. Second, there is a call for more studies with similar research interests to examine the previous findings because almost no two studies have a similar research focus. Third, the contents of direct affective interventions need to be clearly defined so that the similar intervention could be replicated. Fourth, boys and girls preferred same-gender group and group leaders. Fifth, a variety of methods were used. It is a positive finding that researchers used a variety of methods to measure the outcomes of the direct affective interventions.

This exploratory study investigated the social and affective concerns of 280 high-ability students in Grades 5 through 12 who participated in a summer residential program. Content analysis of responses from an open-ended survey indicated that high-ability adolescents expressed concerns regarding feelings and emotions, future aspirations, and relationships. How these social and affective concerns differed across gender, age, and among U.S. students, international students, and Native American subgroups were also investigated. Boys would like to discuss puberty and maturity more than girls; students in early adolescence cared about feelings, whereas those in late adolescence wanted to discuss future aspirations; Native American students had similar concerns to those of other students; however, Diné students were concerned about personal issues and bullying. These findings provide researchers and educators in the field of gifted education with new perspectives regarding social and affective concerns of high-ability students.

This study is to investigate whether "My Class Activities" (MCA; Gentry & Gable, 2001a), an instrument developed to measure students' perceptions of their classroom activities, yields valid data when used with elementary students in China after translation into Chinese. The four factors measured by the instrument (Interest, Challenge, Choice, and Enjoyment) are related closely to students' motivation and optimal learning as described in Chinese literature. Data from 943 elementary students from a school in mid-China were used in the analyses from an elementary school. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that a four correlated factor model with all 31 items was not a good fit to the data. Factor loadings were checked, and two items were removed from the "challenge" factor. A second four correlated factor model with 29 items generated better goodness-of-fit indices. Measurement equivalence of this model was tested between the Chinese and the U.S. sample of 943 students randomly selected from the original normative sample of the MCA. Results indicated partial measurement invariance of the revised instrument. Further research was suggested with implications for practice.

This retrospective qualitative study was designed to investigate perceptions of the learning experiences of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)-talented male students who were in a self-contained, single-gender, gifted program in a selective high school in Taiwan. Twenty-four graduates of the high school's gifted program completed a confidential survey and participated in one-on-one interviews. The participants identified the most valuable learning experience as the independent study course; they reported that the independent study course influenced their choice of college major and positively affected their studies in their senior year of college. Most participants valued their overall academic experience in the self-contained program, although a few reported that they were unable to learn so many science-related subjects simultaneously at such a fast pace, suggesting that this type of program needs to be differentiated. The social impacts of the program varied. Implications of the findings for educators as well as suggestions for future research are discussed.

The primary purpose of this study was to compare language and narrative skills of both talented and regular young children in Taiwan. The participants were asked to tell a story based on images in children's picture books. Twelve children, who participated in a screening session designed to identify young talented children for the Enrichment Program for Cultivating Problem Solving Abilities and Multiple Intelligences for Talented Preschoolers (PSMIGP program), were divided into a verbally talented group (VT) and a regular group (RE). The stories told by the participants were tape-recorded, transcribed, and coded using the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). The results indicated that the verbally talented children demonstrated their linguistic talents at as young as four years of age. In telling a story, they used more clauses and more words that were different to complete the task. In addition, they used more modifiers (i.e. adjectives and adverbs) and employed more conjunctions that were more complex. However, there were no differences between the two groups in mean length of utterance (MLU) and type-token ratios (TTRs). This paper presents a discussion on the implications of this study and offers suggestions for future research.

Design-based research (DBR) is a new methodological framework that was developed in the context of the learning sciences; however, it has not been used very often in the field of gifted education. Compared with other methodologies, DBR is more process-oriented and context-sensitive. In this methodological brief, the authors introduce DBR and explain why it can be useful to researchers in the field of gifted education. The authors give an overview of the history and the key features of DBR, then discuss the challenges of using DBR. Based on both the literature and the authors' experiences using DBR as a framework in their own empirical studies, suggestions are provided to help gifted education researchers who would like to use DBR.