From the editor's desk.

Welcome to Roeper Review's Fall issue of volume 27. As we continue to examine our evolving field, Rena Subotnik provides a welcome perspective in her interview of John Feldhusen, a professor emeritus from Purdue University with a rich history in gifted education. From the interview, we learn of his influences and emphases, his proudest accomplishments and his sense of the history of the field of gifted education.

In our Point/Counterpoint section, Larry Coleman, Francoys Gagne, and Bonnie Cramond explain their individual views on the question "Is consensus on a definition of giftedness in the field possible, desirable, or necessary?" These great thinkers have diverse opinions and I hope their ideas will be discussed for some time to come. I also believe that their points illustrate that a need exists for a national dialogue on the question. Perhaps The Association for the Gifted (TAG) or the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) will pursue this important topic.

Jim Gallagher, a scholar and gentleman from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will be joining us periodically in a new column sharing his thoughts on the field. In this first column, he shares his comments from an award ceremony for Talent Identification Program (TIP) recipients. His message to these young people is one we can all learn from. How can we be better "problem finders" in our domain? I hope you will enjoy Dr. Gallagher's words of wisdom as I have over the years.

In his article "Multiple Intelligences of Chinese Gifted Students in Hong Kong: Perspectives from Students, Parents, Teachers, and Peers," David Chan explores the use of multiple intelligence profiles created by others for a gifted student. Just how reliably can others assess a student's varied intelligences? Such studies are valuable as more researchers begin to operationalize Howard Gardner's proposed intelligences.

Like Gardner's multiple intelligences, Goleman's emotional intelligence has received a great deal of interest, but inadequate research. Many such proposals that have great face validity in fact have not been tested empirically. Scott Woitaszewski and Matt Aalsma set out to understand "The Contribution of Emotional Intelligence to the Social and Academic Success of Gifted Adolescents as Measured by the Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale Adolescent Version." Face validity cannot take the place of this kind of quality research. The authors found that emotional intelligence does not appear to make any difference in the success of this study's sample, despite popular opinion that it should.

Several articles in this issue will be of particular interest to teachers. Lisa Stamps studied attitudes towards curriculum compacting among first graders, a much younger group than we have seen before in the compacting literature. Dr. Stamps shares her findings in her article "The Effectiveness of Curriculum Compacting in First Grade Classrooms."

In their article "Influence of Gender and Academic Ability in a Computer-Based Spanish Reading Task," Greg Taylor and Ofelia Nikolova report on their study of foreign language learning. Gender and ability level interact to affect performance on the vocabulary retention and reading comprehension tasks utilized in the study. This type of study is sorely needed in our field.

Teachers are encouraged to conduct their own research in Matthew McBee's article "The Classroom as Laboratory: An Exploration of Teacher Research." Although they are the group most likely to directly impact the gifted children we study, many teachers are uncomfortable engaging in research of their own. The reasons this discomfort exists and how and why it should be overcome are discussed.

We share two recent dissertations in our Dissertation Abstracts Section, edited by Judith Margison, and Claire Hughes, our Book Review Editor, has provided Dona Matthews' review of Joyce VanTassel-Baska's book, Content-Based Curriculum for High-Ability Learners. I hope you will enjoy this issue and be on the lookout for some special issues currently being prepared. As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to forward them to me at the address below.

Dr. Tracy L. Cross, Editor

Roeper Review

Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and Humanities

Ball State University

Muncie, Indiana 47306

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