From the editor's desk.

Welcome to Volume 30, Issue 2, of the Roeper Review. Most articles in this issue delve into some important issues of diversity and contextual influences on the gifted. Several articles explore influences on gifted African American young people as well as the scholars who study this dimension of high ability. Others look into specific aspects of sociocontextual environments and the demands they place on the gifted. We also have some scrutiny of extant identification processes with some recommendations for improvement.

In a field long dominated by Eurocentric sociocultural contexts we need more attention to the ways in which giftedness interacts with racial and ethnic diversity. Fortunately, our first set of articles address various aspects of the African American experience in gifted education.

In the article "Conducting Cross-Cultural Research: Controversy, Cautions, Concerns, and Considerations," Donna Ford, James Moore, Gilman Whiting, and Tarek Grantham look into an important, underdeveloped, tacit dimension of our field. Recognizing that perfect objectivity is a generally accepted research ideal, they go on to point out the impossibility of achieving it. After discussing this conundrum, they emphasize the importance of investigators becoming more aware of their own beliefs, values, and paradigms, especially when working with racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse research participants.

Fred Bonner, Michael Jennings, Aretha Marbley, and Lesley-Ann Brown borrow important research and theory from beyond our field to shed light on the experiences and needs of African American males. In the article "Capitalizing on Leadership Capacity: Gifted African American Males in High School," they focus on the leadership dimension of giftedness to redress the underrepresentation of African American males in gifted programs. Their analysis highlights resiliency and identity development among other aspects of high ability. The article concludes with discussions of programs that can enhance the development of leadership while strengthening positive identity formation.

In the article "Cultural Competence: Preparing Gifted Students for a Diverse Society," Donna Ford and Gilman Whiting build on the work on teachers' cultural competence to make the case that we should attend more to the ability of students to interact effectively with diverse peers and groups. While demonstrating how culturally competent individuals work effectively with those whose cultures differ from the mainstream, they argue that young people must improve in these areas. Diversity in student populations is large and growing so cultural competence is becoming more important.

Kelly Rodgers explores the role of identity in its various forms and its effects on the underachievement of African American students in the article "Racial Identity, Centrality and Giftedness: An Expectancy-Value Application of Motivation in Gifted African American Students." She applies the social-identity literature to gifted education, including the concept of race centrality and various theories and bodies of research evidence on identity and motivation. Her analysis reinforces notions that motivation is affected by race, context, self-concept, and social stigma, among other factors.

Two articles provide different perspectives on some complex influences of immediate contexts on high ability. In the article "Having It All at Sleep's Expense: The Forced Choice of Participants in Advanced Placement Courses and International Baccalaureate Programs," Regan Clark Foust, Holly Hertberg-Davis, and Carolyn Callahan investigated some important aspects of the lives of the gifted and how they impose excessive demands. While studying the ways in which current and former Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate students felt forced to choose between academic success and social acceptance, they found that students felt they could have both (have it all) but at high costs in terms of time, effort, stress, and lack of sleep. A number of dispositions gifted students tend to manifest can exacerbate or ameliorate these problems.

Virginia Burney gives us a window into self-conceptions shaped by social context in the article "Applications of Social Cognitive Theory to Gifted Education." Employing social cognitive theory, which emphasizes the extent and nature of interactions between the self and the sociocontextual environment, she analyzes some prevalent service models of giftedness to ascertain how they address these dynamics of individual functioning within social networks. The analysis pays particular attention to self-efficacy, self-regulation, and other aspects of performance.

Steven Pfeiffer, Yaacov Petscher, and Alper Kumtepe discuss the nettlesome limitations of current identification processes in the article "The Gifted Rating Scales-School Form: A Validation Study Based on Age, Gender, and Race." In an effort to grapple with identification issues, which have plagued our field for decades, they studied the usefulness of a new rating scale for selecting students for gifted programming. They looked at a number of dimensions of identification including gender, race/ethnicity, and age, as well as the degree of familiarity teachers have with students under consideration for a gifted program. The findings supported use of the scale.

In our "Evolving Field" section Jim Gallagher makes you think more about ways in which the gifted can confront global macroproblems such as environmental devastation, looming resource shortages, and unethical leadership in today's complex world. In the article "Apply Powerful Young Minds to Global Problems," he promotes the notion that today's gifted young people may be more capable of solving these global problems than the adults who currently Control the levers of power. His ideas connect back to our recent special issue on global awareness.

Sue Henshon provides another intriguing interview with a prominent thinker whose work influences our field. This time she interviews Robert Sternberg, a highly influential and prolific Renaissance thinker whose work fans out broadly across the fields of gifted education, creative studies, and beyond while considerably enriching theory and research. Here, Sternberg provides insights about his thought processes and motivations as an investigator while shedding additional light on some of his most important work. Getting to know Sternberg better will give us stronger understanding of creativity, intelligence, wisdom, love, leadership, and other phenomena pertinent to high ability.

Dona Matthews, our Book Review Editor, wraps up the issue with a review from Renate Otterbach who provides a helpful overview of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Cambridge University Press), edited by Ericsson, Charness, Hoffman, and Feltovich.

Finally, our new partnership with the Routledge/Taylor & Francis publishing house continues its evolution to the benefit of Roeper Review. Their expertise is enabling us to magnify our visibility and international influence. Watch for announcements in the near future about new, electronic article submission and review processes. As always, thanks go to scholars in the field who continue to follow interesting, productive research trajectories that generate important insights about high ability. Our diligent reviewers deserve special admiration for carefully refining and screening the work we receive.

Don Ambrose, PhD, Editor, Roeper Review

Professor of Graduate Education

Graduate Department, School of Education

College of Liberal Arts, Education, and Sciences

Rider University 

2083 Lawrenceville Road

Lawrenceville, NJ 08648-3099

E-mail: [e-mail]