Myth 1: The Gifted and Talented Constitute One Single Homogeneous Group and Giftedness Is a Way of Being That Stays in the Person Over Time and Experiences

Can a field that prides itself on promoting creativity and innovation in young people handle these processes itself? Deep-seated values, attitudes, and beliefs about the meaning of giftedness and how we should identify students for gifted programs have been slow to change because the evidence leading to this change conflicts with long-standing attitudes from outdated research, personal beliefs, and an education system that places more emphasis on administrative expediency than recent evidence about human potential. Tidiness and efficiency are important to the operation of any enterprise but should never take the place of responsibility to do the right thing for the young people we serve. Einstein, the personification of scientific giftedness across ages and cultures, said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” After having spent more than seven decades of our collective lives in the field of gifted education as teachers, school psychologist, coordinator, researchers, and university professors interested in the nurturance of gifts and talents, we believe there is no more potentially dangerous and false myth than the one above. Let us, therefore, begin this response with the following resounding statement: There is no single homogeneous group of gifted children and adults, and giftedness is developmental, not fixed at birth. Our work (Reis, 2005; Renzulli, 1978, 2005), as well as the collective work of others, some of whom we briefly mention, has contributed unequivocally to a robust research base that enables us to point convincingly to the heterogeneity of the group labeled “gifted” and the certainty we hold about giftedness as a developmental concept. More than a decade ago, a task force of psychologists and educators spent 2 years reviewing all the extant research on the social and emotional characteristics and needs of gifted and talented children and young adults resulting in an edited volume (Neihart, Reis, Robinson, & Moon, 2002). While completing that summary, we read hundreds of articles about gifted and talented children and adolescents, and in our executive summary, we stated,