Cultural concepts of giftedness.

Two 9-year-old children are being considered for admission to a gifted program in their school in California. One of them has scored 141 on an IQ test, is in the 99th percentile on statewide achievement tests, and is highly recommended for her cognitive abilities by her teacher. The other has scored 124 on an IQ test and is only in the 90th percentile on the statewide achievement tests, but has been described by her teacher has having superb social skills and emotional intelligence. Which do you admit?

The Problem

The question, I argue here, is more complicated than it appears. Suppose that the first child happens to be Asian American and the second is Latino American. Okagaki and Sternberg (1993) found that Asian Americans tend to emphasize cognitive competence in their conception of intelligence, whereas Latino Americans tend to emphasize socioemotional competence. So it is not unlikely that the Asian-American child was socialized in a way that promoted the development of cognitive competencies, whereas the Latino American was socialized in a way that emphasized socioemotional competencies. If one views giftedness in terms of each child's skill in profiting from his or her environment of socialization, there might be little difference between the two children in their levels of giftedness. For a school to understand the child, the school must understand the home community's conception of the gifted child, and how the child stacks up in terms of the norms of the home community.

One could argue, and some would argue, that the difference in cultural conceptions does not really matter--that the IQ test provides objective evidence of giftedness that transcends cultures and hence is authoritative in a unique way (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Jensen, 1998; Rushton & Jensen, 2005). But this argument rings hollow for a number of reasons.

First, the IQ test to a large extent reflects a cultural conception of competence. The test was designed (Binet & Simon, 1905) to predict school performance, and that is what it does second only to other, similar tests. But school performance is not equally valued everywhere (Sternberg, 2004), and even in our own culture, is reduced in importance after children leave school and go into the world of work. Originally, the Binet-Simon conception of intelligence was an early twentieth-century French one. The conception today is more that of early twenty-first century U.S. and British researchers and practitioners.

Second, even in cultures that highly value schooling, the test is not necessarily of great or any importance. Most countries in the world, including the country in which it was originated--France--do not use it, as a measure of giftedness, or for other typical educational purposes (Heller, Monks, Sternberg, & Subotnik, 2000). Today, the French rarely use either Binet and Simon's IQ test or any other.

Third, the kind of intelligence it measures is included in most contemporary conceptions of giftedness, but is in no way sufficient for identification of giftedness in these conceptions (Sternberg & Davidson, 1986, 2005). Other kinds of intelligence matter as much or more, such as the socioemotional kind of intelligence exhibited by the Latino American child in the initial example (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 2000; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2000; R. K. Wagner, 2000).

It might seem impractical to judge children of each sociocultural group differently by taking into account the kind of socialization with which they were raised. But is there any other choice? Just as we do not expect children who learn English as a second language to perform comparably on English-language examinations to children who learned English as a first language, so should we not expect children socialized according to different "languages" of what it means to be smart to perform similarly on measures that originally were created to represent the skills valued by one particular group, and even in this case, a limited set of skills.

The main thesis of this article is that, in assessing giftedness, we must take cultural origins and contexts into account. Some schools already do this; others do not. The same children we may view as gifted may not be viewed as such in another culture, and the children the other culture views as gifted, we may see as ordinary. Because so many countries, including the United States, have become multicultural, the message is not just about countries that are far away from our own. Within our own country, there may be widespread differences in what cultural groups view as gifted performance.

Some readers may infer that the view that children of different cultures may be gifted in different ways implies that "every child is gifted." This is not the case. On the one hand, children who are not labeled as gifted using traditional measures may be gifted in terms of other cultural contexts. But children who are labeled as gifted using traditional measures may not be gifted in terms of these other contexts. So taking culture into account can lead people who are not labeled as gifted to become labeled as gifted, but also, vice versa.

Theoretical Approach

The theoretical approach underlying our cultural work is the theory of successful intelligence and giftedness (Sternberg, 1997; Sternberg & Clinkenbeard, 1995). According to this theory, individuals are gifted if they have the abilities needed to reach their own goals within their sociocultural context. Individuals are successfully intelligent to the extent that they capitalize on strengths and compensate for weaknesses in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments. They do so through a combination of analytical (traditional academic), creative, and practical abilities.

The basic mental structures and processes underlying intelligence are the same across cultures (see also Carroll, 1993). What differs, in the theory of successful intelligence, is the extent to which these structures and processes are relevant to, and are considered to be relevant for, adaptation within different cultural milieus.

Cultural Differences in Conceptions of Abilities

Our research and that of others shows that differences in conceptions of intelligence extend beyond Anglo American, Asian American, and Latino American groups. In studies done around the world (Sternberg & Kaufman, 1998), we have found that conceptions of intelligence differ as a function of culture. Taiwanese Chinese, for example, include interpersonal and intrapersonal (self-understanding) skills in their conception of intelligence (Yang & Sternberg, 1997).

A Review of Traditional Literature

Studies in Africa provide yet another window on the substantial differences in conceptions of intelligence across cultures. Ruzgis and Grigorenko (1994) argued that, in Africa, conceptions of intelligence revolve largely around skills that help facilitate and maintain harmonious and stable intergroup relations; intragroup relations are probably equally important and at times more important. For example, Serpell (1974, 1996) found that Chewa adults in Zambia emphasize social responsibilities, cooperativeness, and obedience as important to intelligence; intelligent children are expected to be respectful of adults. Kenyan parents also emphasize responsible participation in family and social life as important aspects of intelligence (Super & Harkness, 1982, 1986, 1993). In Zimbabwe, the word for intelligence, ngware, actually means to be prudent and cautious, particularly in social relationships. Among the Baoule, service to the family and community, and politeness toward and respect for elders are seen as key to intelligence (Dasen, 1984).

Implicit Conceptions of Intelligence and Giftedness

The emphasis on the social aspects of intelligence is not limited to African cultures. Notions of intelligence in many Asian cultures also emphasize the social aspect of intelligence more than does the conventional Western or IQ-based notion (Azuma & Kashiwagi, 1987; Lutz, 1985; Poole, 1985; White, 1985).

It should be noted that neither African nor Asian concepts emphasize exclusively social notions of intelligence. These conceptions of intelligence place more emphasis on social skills than do conventional U.S. conceptions of intelligence, but at the same time recognize the importance of cognitive aspects of intelligence. In a study of Kenyan conceptions of intelligence (Grigorenko, Geissler, et al., 2001), it was found that there are four distinct terms constituting conceptions of intelligence among rural Kenyans--rieko (knowledge and skills), luoro (respect), winjo (comprehension of how to handle real-life problems), and paro (initiative)--with only the first directly referring to knowledge-based skills (including but not limited to the academic). Even people in the United States have broader conceptions of intelligence than just IQ, including within their conceptions skills such as practical problem solving, verbal ability, and social competence (Sternberg, Conway, Ketron, & Bernstein, 1981).

People in different cultures may have quite different ideas of what it means to be smart. One of the more interesting cross-cultural studies of intelligence was performed by Michael Cole and his colleagues (Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, 1971). They asked adult members of the Kpelle tribe in Africa to sort terms. They found that what North Americans might think of as sophisticated thinking--for example, sorting taxonomically (as in a robin being a kind of bird)--might be viewed as unsophisticated by the Kpelle, whose functional performance on sorting tasks corresponded to the demands of their everyday life (as in a robin flying). In a related fashion, Bruner, Olver, and Greenfield (1966) found that among members of the Wolof tribe of Senegal, increasingly greater Western-style schooling was associated with greater use of taxonomic classification.

Cole's work built, in turn, upon earlier work, such as that of Luria (1931, 1976), who's studies showed that Asian peasants in the Soviet Union might not perform well on cognitive tasks because of their refusal to accept the tasks as they were presented. Indeed, people in diverse cultures are presented with very diverse tasks in their lives. Gladwin (1970), studying the Puluwat who inhabit the Caroline Islands in the South Pacific, found that these individuals were able to master knowledge domains including wind and weather, ocean currents, and movements of the stars. They integrate this knowledge with mental maps of the islands to become navigators who are highly respected in their world.

Competence as Tied to Culture

In related work, Serpell (1979) designed a study to distinguish between a generalized perceptual-deficit hypothesis and a more context-specific hypothesis for why children in certain cultures may show inferior perceptual abilities. He found that English children did better on a drawing task, but that Zambian children did better on a wire-shaping task. Thus, children performed better using materials that were more familiar to them from their own environments.

D. A. Wagner (1978) had Moroccan and North American individuals remember patterns of Oriental rugs and others remember pictures of everyday objects, such as a rooster and a fish. There was no evidence of a difference in memory structure, but the evidence of a lack of difference depended precisely upon using tests that were appropriate to the cultural content of the individuals being studied. Moroccans, who have a long history in the rug trade, seemed to remember things in a different way from participants who did not have experience in remembering rug patterns. In a related study, Kearins (1981) found that when asked to remember visuospatial displays, Anglo Australians used verbal (school-appropriate) strategies whereas aboriginals used visual (desert nomad-appropriate) strategies.

Goodnow (1962) found that for tasks using combinations and permutations, Chinese children with English schooling performed as well as or better than Europeans, whereas children with Chinese schooling, or from very low-income families, did somewhat worse than European children. These results suggested that the form of schooling primes children to excel in certain ways and not others (see also Goodnow, 1962).

Children from non-European or non-North American cultures do not always do worse on tests. Super (1976) found evidence that African infants sit and walk earlier than their counterparts in the United States and Europe. But Super also found that mothers in the African cultures he studied made a conscious effort to teach their babies to sit and walk as early as possible. At more advanced levels of development, Stigler, Lee, Lucker, and Stevenson (1982; see also Stevenson & Stigler, 1994) found that Japanese and Chinese children test better for developed mathematical skills than do North American children.

T. N. Carraher, D. Carraher, and Schliemann (1985) studied a group of children that is especially relevant for assessing intelligence as adaptation to the environment--a group of Brazilian street children. Brazilian street children are under great contextual pressure to form a successful street business. If they do not, they risk death at the hands of so-called "death squads," which may murder children who, unable to earn money, resort to robbing stores (or who are suspected of resorting to robbing stores). Hence, if they are not intelligent in the sense of adapting to their environment, they risk death. The investigators found that the same children who are able to do the mathematics needed to run their street businesses are often less able or unable to do school mathematics. In fact, the more abstracted and removed from real-world contexts the problems are in their form of presentation, the worse the children typically do on the problems. For children in school, the street context would be farther removed from their lives. These results suggest that differences in context can have a powerful effect on performance (see also Ceci & Roazzi, 1994; Nunes, 1994, for related work).

Such differences are not limited to Brazilian street children. Lave (1988) showed that Berkeley housewives who successfully could do the mathematics needed for comparison-shopping in the supermarket were unable to do the same mathematics when they were placed in a classroom and given isomorphic problems presented in an abstract form. In other words, their problem was not at the level of mental processes but at the level of applying the processes in specific environmental contexts.

A Recent Study in Kenya

In a study in Usenge, Kenya, near the town of Kisumu, researchers were interested in school-age children's ability to adapt to their indigenous environment. They devised a test of practical intelligence for adaptation to the environment (see Sternberg & Grigorenko, 1997; Sternberg, Nokes, et al., 2001). The test of practical intelligence measured children's informal, tacit knowledge for natural herbal medicines that the villagers believe can be used to fight various types of infections. Tacit knowledge is, roughly speaking, what one needs to know to succeed in an environment; it is usually not explicitly taught, and often is not even verbalized (Sternberg, Forsythe, et al., 2000). Children in the villages use their tacit knowledge of these medicines an average of once a week in medicating themselves and others. More than 95% of the children suffer from parasitic illnesses. Thus, tests of how to use these medicines constitute effective measures of one aspect of practical intelligence as defined by the villagers as well as their life circumstances in their environmental contexts. Note that the processes of intelligence are not different in Kenya. Children must still recognize the existence of an illness, define what it is, devise a strategy to combat it, and so forth. But the content to which the processes are applied, and hence appropriate ways of testing these processes, may be quite different. Consider an item from our tacit-knowledge test for Kenyan children. Correct answers are asterisked.

A small child in your family has homa. She has a sore throat, headache, and fever. She has been sick for 3 days. Which of the following five Yadh nyaluo (Luo herbal medicines) can treat homa?

1. Chamama. Take the leaf and fito (sniff medicine up the nose to sneeze out illness). *

2. Kaladali. Take the leaves, drink, and fito. *

3. Obuo. Take the leaves and fito. *

4. Ogaka. Take the roots, pound, and drink.

5. Ahundo. Take the leaves and fito.

Many rural Kenyan children performed quite well on this test. Children in the United States would most likely perform at chance. There is good reason for rural Kenyan children to know the answers to these questions. In contrast, there is no reason for U.S. children to know the answers to these questions. But if we think about the kinds of things we ask on IQ tests, the same statements might apply, but in reverse.

Middle-class Westerners might find it quite a challenge to thrive or even survive in these contexts, or, for that matter, in the contexts of urban ghettos often not distant from their comfortable homes. For example, they would know how to use none of the natural herbal medicines to combat the diverse and abundant parasitic illnesses they might acquire in rural Kenya.

The researchers measured the Kenyan children's ability to identify the medicines, where they come from, what they are used for, and how they are dosed. Based on work done elsewhere, the researchers expected that scores on this test would not correlate with scores on conventional tests of intelligence. To test this hypothesis, they also administered to the 85 children in the study the Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices Test (J. C. Raven, Court, & J. Raven, 1992), which is a measure of fluid or abstract-reasoning-based abilities, as well as the Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale (J. C. Raven et al.), which is a measure of crystallized or formal-knowledge-based abilities. In addition, they gave the children a comparable test of vocabulary in their own Dholuo language. The Dholuo language is spoken in the home, English in the schools.

To their surprise, all correlations between the test of indigenous tacit knowledge and scores on fluid-ability and crystallized ability tests were negative. The correlations with the tests of crystallized abilities were significantly so. For example, the correlation of tacit knowledge with vocabulary (English and Dholuo combined) was -.31 (p < .01). In other words, the higher the children scored on the test of tacit knowledge, the lower they scored, on average, on the tests of crystallized abilities (vocabulary).

This surprising result can be interpreted in various ways, but based on the ethnographic observations of the anthropologists on the team, Prince and Geissler (see Prince & Geissler, 200 l), they concluded that a plausible scenario takes into account the expectations of families for their children. Many children drop out of school before graduation, for financial or other reasons, and many families in the village do not particularly see the advantages of formal Western schooling. There is no reason they should, because the children of many families will for the most part spend their lives farming or engaged in other occupations that make little or no use of Western schooling. These families emphasize teaching their children the indigenous, informal knowledge that will lead to successful adaptation in the environments in which they will live. Children who spend their time learning the indigenous practical knowledge of the community may not always invest themselves heavily in doing well in school, whereas children who do well in school generally may invest themselves less heavily in learning the indigenous knowledge--hence the negative correlations.

The Kenya study suggests that the identification of a general factor of human intelligence may tell us more about how abilities interact with cultural patterns of schooling and society, and especially Western patterns of schooling and society, than it does about the structure of human abilities. In Western schooling, children typically study a variety of subject matters from an early age and thus develop skills in a variety of skill areas. This kind of schooling prepares the children to take a test of intelligence, which typically measures skills in a variety of areas. Often intelligence tests measure skills that children were expected to acquire a few years before taking the intelligence test. But as Rogoff (1990, 2003) and others have noted, this pattern of schooling is not universal and has not even been common for much of the history of humankind. Throughout history and in many places still, schooling, especially for boys, takes the form of apprenticeships in which children learn a craft from an early age. They learn what they will need to know to succeed in a trade, but not a lot more. They are not simultaneously engaged in tasks that require the development of the particular blend of skills measured by conventional intelligence tests. Hence, it is less likely that one would observe a general factor in their scores, much as we discovered in Kenya.

From the standpoint of an academic test, the rural Kenyan children would not look very bright. But, in fact, they had learned knowledge that was important in their own cultural context. A teacher might be inclined to "write off" such children because of their underdeveloped academic skills, without appreciating that the children had developed other skills that were, arguably, more important for adaptation in their own cultural milieus. Ideally, the teacher would attempt to capitalize on what the children know, using it as a starting point, or scaffold, upon which other knowledge could be built. But certainly, the children could not be faulted for lacking learning skills. They merely had applied these skills to content other than that sanctioned by the schools.

A Recent Study in Alaska

Researchers have found related, although certainly not identical results, in a study of Yup'ik Eskimo children in southwestern Alaska (Grigorenko, Meier, et al., 2004). They assessed the importance of academic and practical intelligence in rural and semi-urban Alaskan communities.

This research was motivated by an observation made while working both with the Eskimo children and with their teachers. The teachers made it clear that they considered the children not to be particularly bright. And indeed, in terms of the knowledge and skills emphasized in traditional schooling, the children did not fare well. But at the same time, the children had developed superior skills of other kinds. They possessed knowledge about hunting, fishing, gathering, herbal treatments of illnesses, and other topics that their teachers did not possess. For example, they could take a dogsled from their village to another village in the dead of winter and find their way. Their teachers, in contrast, if they tried to do the same in the dead of winter, would end up dead. They would not be able to discern the landmarks that the children use to find their way. They quickly would get lost. So the children had adaptive skills relevant to their own environments that the teachers did not have. But of course, it is the teachers who society sanctions to do the evaluations, not the students.

Consider an example of an item from our test for Yup'ik Eskimo children. The children did quite well on the test. Mainland children, and even most mainstream Alaskan children, would perform quite poorly:

When Eddie runs to collect the ptarmigan that he's just shot, he notices that its front pouch (balloon) is full of ptarmigan food. This is a sign that:

1. There's a storm on the way. *

2. Winter is almost over.

3. It's hard to find food this season.

4. It hasn't snowed in a long time.

In the study a total of 261 children were rated for practical skills by adults or peers: 69 in grade 9, 69 in grade 10, 45 in grade 11, and 37 in grade 12. Of these children, 145 were females (74 from the rural and 71 from the semi-urban communities) and 116 were males (62 were from the rural and 54 were from the semi-urban communities). They measured academic intelligence with conventional measures of fluid (the Cattell Culture Fair Test of g; R. B. Cattell & H. E. P. Cattell, 1973) and crystallized intelligence (the Mill-Hill Vocabulary Scale; J. C. Raven et al., 1992). They measured practical intelligence with a test of tacit knowledge of skills (hunting, fishing, dealing with weather conditions, picking and preserving plants, and so on) as acquired in rural Alaskan Yup'ik communities (the Yup'ik Scale of Practical Intelligence, YSPI). With statistical significance, the semi-urban children outperformed the rural children on the measure of crystallized intelligence, while the rural children outperformed the semi-urban children on the measure of the YSPI. The test of tacit knowledge skills was superior to the tests of academic intelligence in predicting practical skills as evaluated by adults and peers of the rural children (for whom the test was created), but not of the semi-urban ones.

This study, like the Kenya study, suggests the importance of practical intellectual skills for predicting adaptation to everyday environments. Here, as in Kenya, the processes of intelligence do not differ from those in the environments in which most readers of this article live. The Eskimo children need, for example, to plan trips, just as we all do. But the constraints of planning these trips, often by dog sled in environments with no landmarks we would recognize, are very different, and hence different tests are needed.

The cultural meaning of an act of assessment can vary from one place to another. For example, Greenfield (1997) found that it means a different thing to take a test among Mayan children than it does among most children in the United States. The Mayan expectation is that collaboration is permissible, and that it is rather unnatural not to collaborate. Such a finding is consistent with the work of Markus and Kitayama (1991), suggesting different cultural constructions of the self in individualistic versus collectivistic cultures.

The Validity Question

One may worry about the validity of unusual measures of abilities. Do they predict anything? We have addressed this question, in part, through a project called the Rainbow Project (Sternberg and the Rainbow Project Collaborators, 2006). The idea underlying this project is that it should be possible to construct a test that, while not perfectly adapted to every possible cultural context, better takes into account the range of abilities valued across different cultures. Such a test would not be culture-free or even culture-fair. Rather, it would be more broadly culture-relevant than many traditional tests.

In the study, roughly 1,000 students of widely varying levels of abilities and achievement from two high schools and 13 colleges were administered a test that assessed their analytical, creative, and practical skills. The test was based on the theory of successful intelligence (Sternberg, 1997), which promotes the idea that people need creative abilities to generate novel ideas, analytical abilities to ensure that the ideas are good ones, and practical abilities to execute the ideas and to persuade other people of their value. Results showed that the test roughly doubled prediction of first-year college (freshman) grade-point average over the SAT alone, and that it substantially reduced differences in scores among students of different ethnic and cultural groups.

These results suggest that it is at least possible to construct a test that has some broad, although not perfect, cultural relevance, and that has predictive validity to academic performance. This approach is not limited to predicting undergraduate performance. It also can be used in elementary and secondary schools (Chart, Grigorenko, & Sternberg, in press) as well as in graduate and professional schools (Hedlund, Wilt, Nebel, Ashford, & Sternberg, 2006).

The underlying point is that at least some assessments can be created that increase predictive validity while also decreasing ethnic and cultural differences. The cultural approach need not be "soft". It can be used to make hardnosed assessments of giftedness within and across cultural groups.

There is No Lingua Franca of Conceptions of Giftedness

Is it possible to create any one test that will adequately take into account the full range of different conceptions of giftedness parents of diverse cultures may have? Probably not. There is no one test that will adequately represent all of the diverse cultures of the world, any more than there is any one language that will represent these cultures. An analogy may be instructive.

Recognizing the difficulties of communication in a world in which there are so many different languages, linguists of the twentieth century formulated a language that was intended to be a lingua franca across all of the world's linguistic communities. The language was called Esperanto, and it borrowed linguistic elements from many of the world's languages. Moreover, it had the advantage of being substantially simpler in structure than most of these languages. For a while, in the mid-twentieth century, there were those who believed that Esperanto had a chance of becoming the lingua franca it was intended to be. But it failed. How many people speak Esperanto today? How many young people have even heard of it?

The language failed because it had no deep cultural tradition associated with it. There is no body of literature, or philosophy, or political theory, or even oral tradition. In a word, there was nothing. The lesson of Esperanto is that a language is more than just the sum of its vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. In the same way, the language of giftedness represents a set of cultural values. In one culture, children may be labeled as gifted as a result of their scholastic skills; in another, as a result of their hunting and/or gathering skills; and in yet another, as a result of their fishing skills or homemaking skills. Even when people move from one country to another, or one continent to another, they bring with them aspects of their culture. When Asians immigrated to the United States, many of them brought with them their reverence for education and analytical thinking. For the most part, their attitudes were a good match to the implicit theories of the educational establishment. Other groups have come to the U.S. with attitudes that do not closely match the conceptions of giftedness. But there is no one "right" definition of giftedness. Conceptions of giftedness differ between and even within cultures, and the lesson of a cultural approach is that we need to honor these differences and do our best to take them into account. There is no "Esperanto" of giftedness, and if there were, it would fail, just as the language Esperanto did. But as the Rainbow Project shows, it is possible to create a test that, at least to some extent, broadens conceptions of giftedness so as to take into account more, although certainly not all, cultural conceptions.

By testing children for giftedness outside their cultural context, we may fail to identify children who, by virtue of their cultural context, are gifted. We also may identify as gifted those children who are not so outstanding, considering their background. One might argue that such differences do not matter if all of the children are expected to perform within the context of a single cultural conception, say, that of the mainstream of the United States. Such an argument is weak, however. We can measure ability to perform in the future only as a function of an individual's having taken advantage of the opportunities for socialization he or she has had in the past. Someone who is brilliant but only speaks Russian is more likely to be brilliant after learning English than someone who is only average in English, but does better than the Russian speaker on tests of English simply because English is his native language. When we go abroad to countries whose native languages are other than our own, we would look unintelligent indeed if our intelligence were discounted merely because we do not (yet) speak their language.

In summary we need ourselves to be more gifted in identifying giftedness. Pedestrian approaches are easily routinized, but they are an embarrassment, representing shallow attempts to identify students who think deeply. If we wish to identify the gifted accurately, we should put our own gifts on display. We should take into account the cultural contexts in which giftedness is socialized and nurtured. This does not necessarily mean constructing a different test for each child. It does mean understanding his or her performance as, in part, a function of the culture in which he or she was raised, and it means including assessments that enable each child to capitalize on his or her strengths and to compensate for or correct weaknesses.

Manuscript submitted April 24, 2006.

Revision accepted August 3, 2006.

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Robert J. Sternberg is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychology at Tufts University. He has won the Distinguished Scholar Award and the E. Paul Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children. He is a former Associate Director of the National Research Center on Giftedness and Talent. Sternberg's PhD is from Stanford and he has been awarded seven honorary doctorates. E-mail: [e-mail]

Preparation of this article was supported by a government grant under the Javits Act Program (Grant No. R206RO00001) as administered by the Institute of Educational Sciences (formerly the Office of Educational Research and Improvement). Grantees undertaking such projects are encouraged to express freely their professional judgment. This article, therefore, does not necessarily represent the positions or the policies of the U.S. government, and no official endorsement should be inferred. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Robert J. Sternberg, Tufts University, Office of the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Ballou Hall, Medford, MA 02155. [e-mail].