Looking Back: Reviews of Classic Perspectives on Intelligence and Talent.

Terman, Hollingworth, and the Gifted.

The field of research and development that we now call gifted education established its beginning in 1916 with the publication of Measurement of Intelligence: An explanation of and a complete guide for the use of the Stanford Revision and Extension of Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale and in 1925 with the publication of Genetic Studies of Genius, Volume 1: Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children, both by Lewis M. Terman of Stanford University. The highly gifted child from Needham, Indiana, who was skipped from grade one to grade three in his first year in school, who entered college at age 15, and whose doctoral dissertation at Worcester College focused on gifted and slow learners, was indeed an appropriate father for the field of gifted education. Terman would continue to devote a major part of his professional life to the study of gifted youth and to a longitudinal project that began in 1920 with 1,428 12-year-old gifted youth and continues to this day, culminating in the recent publication The Gifted Group in Later Maturity by Carol Holahan and Robert Sears, or Volume VI of the Genetic Studies of Genius.

We now see giftedness factorially or multifaceted but still recognize the broad power of g or general intelligence that characterizes intellectually precocious youth. Now from the work of Francoys Gagne (1993) and others we see giftedness represented by diverse talents, but we have the corroborating research of John Carroll (1999) showing quite conclusively that intelligence can be seen both as general ability (g) and factorially as many specific aptitudes or abilities.

While Lewis Terman and his colleagues at Stanford University concentrated their research efforts on the nature, characteristics, and development of giftedness, Terman's contemporary at Columbia University, Leta Hollingworth, turned her attention to the very highly gifted and their nature and to the education of gifted youth. Her books Gifted children: Their nature and nurture in 1926 and Children above 180 IQ Stanford Binet in 1942 were also milestones in the gifted education movement. Thus, throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s wisdom about the nature and nurture of giftedness grew rapidly and readied the United States for its educational response to the Russian launch of Sputnik in 1957 and for the Marland study that culminated in the extremely influential Marland Report of 1972, that defined giftedness, specified its major types, and called for explicit educational efforts to nurture the abilities of gifted youth.

Immediately after the launching of the Marland Report, money was appropriated by the Federal Government and by many state governments, and a great educational movement for gifted and talented youth emerged. Terman, however, died in 1956 and was not around to see the great proliferation of interest and development in gifted education. However, it is remarkable that as of the writing of this review there continues to be a Terman project office at Stanford University headed by Dr. Albert Hastorf, and the follow up longitudinal data of the Terman project continues to be analyzed and studied by modern-day psychological and educational researchers.

The field of research, development and education that Terman and Hollingworth created has come under serious attack in the past decade as the inclusion movement grew in American schools and gifted education programs were attacked as elitist. Thus, many excellent programs have been eliminated and precocious youth are often left to their own devices in regular classrooms. Research reported by Westberg, Archambault, Doyns, and Salvin (1993) and by Archambault, Westberg, Brown, Hallmark, Zhang, and Emmons (1993) using teacher questionnaires and direct classroom observations revealed that special attention and services for the gifted and talented in regular classrooms are rarely offered or are inconsequential from a curricular point of view.

What Terman and Hollingworth both saw clearly was that the major characteristics of gifted youth were precocity and the ability to learn faster than children of low and average ability. Thus, their special needs are two-fold: instruction at advanced levels and fast-paced instruction. The studies by Westberg et al. (1993) and Archambault et al. (1993) cited above were done at the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. They reported that few regular classroom teachers are able to make such adaptations in their instruction, especially now when the inclusion movement forces them to deal with children who would otherwise be in special education classes. Now there are even widespread calls for gifted youth to assist teachers in instruction of less able youth.

Thus, gifted children whose parents are affluent enough, often flee to private schools and academies while gifted children from poverty and middle income homes are left to languish in regular classrooms. The inequity of public school neglect of gifted and talented youth is truly a national tragedy, although there are some strong research and educational efforts by the National Research Center to develop new methods for the identification and education of disadvantaged students.

The legacy of Lewis Terman has led to worldwide interest, concern, research, and educational efforts related to gifted and talented youth as now reflected in the activity of the World Council on Gifted and Talented Children and regional associations in Europe, Asia, and South America. The whole world is now aware of the problems and educational needs of gifted and talented youth. We are coming to see that youth talents in the artistic, vocational, and personal-social domains are also of great importance and should be addressed in school programs (Feldhusen, 1999; Gagne, 1999).

While the United States and other countries are beset by educational crises of underachievement, a core of researchers, developers, and educational practitioners continue their efforts at the national level in the United States through such organizations as the National Association for Gifted Children and search for better understanding about the nature and nurture of human gifts and talents. The search also continues internationally through the World Council on Gifted and Talented Children and a number of regional organizations such as the European Council on High Ability.

The Terman legacy lives on and inspires our efforts to help gifted and talented youth achieve all that they are capable of and to help them become the leaders of the future in our society. The hundreds of books and articles that flowed from Lewis M. Terman, his Stanford University colleagues, and a host of graduate students over a 35 year period set the stage and moved us far into the modern field of gifted and talented education.

Reviewed by John Feldhusen, emeritus professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Purdue University and former editor of Gifted Child Quarterly.