Challenges and Opportunities for Students Who Are Gifted: What the Experts Say

Five questions were answered by 64 authorities in the gifted field: (a) What do you see as the three greatest identification, assessment, and/or definitional issues in the gifted field? (b) What do you see as the three greatest curricula, instruction, and/or program issues for the gifted student? (c) What are the three most pressing unanswered questions in the gifted field? (d) What have been the three most important research findings in the last 5 years in the gifted field? (e) What are the three most significant developments or innovations in gifted education in the last 5 years? Responses were coded and sorted according to an analytic strategy that permitted the descriptive data to be grouped into a small number of categories. Most frequent categories included a need for consensus on how to define, conceptualize, and identify giftedness; new procedures to increase the under-representation of gifted minority students; and the importance of translating research on educational innovations into practice. Research and practice implications for the gifted field are provided.