Paradigms of Gifted Education

A Guide for Theory-Based, Practice-Focused Research

David Yun Dai, Fei Chen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000494990
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book highlights how to conduct research in gifted education when researchers have to choose from myriad theoretical ideas, hypotheses, claims, practical models, and strategies. It shows researchers how to build clarity, rigor, and relevance into a research agenda that combats fragmentation and contributes to enhanced theoretical and practical endeavors in the field. Specifically, Paradigms of Gifted Education advocates a paradigmatic approach to conducting research in gifted education and shows how it can be done every step of the way by specifying the essential questions of What?, Why?, Who?, and How? in a coherent manner, and by selecting methods that are appropriate for the question asked and the phase of the research efforts. To facilitate the development of a research agenda, the book identifies three major paradigms of gifted education and 20 essential research questions that would help move the field forward.

CHAPTER 1
Conceptual Grounding of Gifted Education

The Essential Questions of What, Why, Who, and How

DOI: 10.4324/9781003236986-2

[The] aim of science is to secure theories with a high problem-solving effectiveness.

—Larry Laudan (1981, p. 145)

The field of gifted studies has theoretical and practical wings. Theoretically, it is an interdisciplinary endeavor that seeks cumulative knowledge, under the umbrella concept of giftedness, of origins and processes of human excellence in all its manifestations on all fronts of human activity, from arts to sciences, from technology innovations to entrepreneurship, from early precocious achievement to adult eminent contributions, and from high-level expertise to creative productivity. The first six parts of the recently published International Handbook on Giftedness (Shavinina, 2009), “the nature of giftedness,” “neuropsychology of giftedness,” “developmental and cognitive foundations of giftedness,” “types of giftedness,” “domain-specific and multiple giftedness,” and “giftedness, society, and economy,” can be considered our foundational knowledge, incorporating a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings of the nature, processes, and consequences of human excellence.

Practically, the field is mainly concerned with educational issues related to identifying and developing giftedness in various forms. The last three parts of the International Handbook, “assessment and identification of giftedness,” “recent advances in gifted education,” and “policy implications and legal issues in gifted education,” represent the field’s practical wing (including, for example, promoting advanced learning and development in formal and informal settings and providing psychological counseling and guidance). Gifted education, which mainly concerns itself with the practical issue of effecting desirable changes, has the following properties:

• It is based on our understanding of what a child can be, if properly nurtured based on his or her aptitudes; therefore, it involves the nature and current state of the child, which we know to some extent, and future developmental states we deem desirable for the child, which are never specified or preordained in the nature of the child, but are appropriate given his or her demonstrated potentials or aptitudes.
• It involves social and ethical considerations; for example, we view gifted children as precious resources that need to be protected and cultivated for the vitality of the society as well as the self-actualization of individuals involved. In the meantime, why some children warrant such services and other do not raises the issue of equity and why some groups are underrep-resented and others overrepresented in gifted education raises the issue of social equality.
• It involves pragmatic considerations, such as time, money, expertise, and how available resources can be used most effectively and efficiently as well as equitably. Thus, the issues of educational productivity and costeffectiveness need to be reckoned with.

Integrating Theory and Practice in Conceptual Grounding of Gifted Education

Conceptual grounding of gifted education entails both the foundational knowledge regarding the nature and development of giftedness and the practical knowledge of gifted education. Historically, a lot of work has been done since Terman to provide such conceptual grounding. For example, with respect to the nature and development of giftedness, numerous definitions and conceptions have been developed; indeed two volumes were edited on the topic (Sternberg & Davidson, 1986, 2005), which lays the foundation for identification, and to a lesser extent, how to educate the gifted. With respect to the means and ends of gifted education, there are various arguments and approaches (see Dai, 2010). Overall, however, theories of giftedness tend to be only loosely connected with practices of gifted education, so much so that the two are typically researched as separate issues (see Dai et al., 2011). One important reason is that rigorous research in gifted education was a relatively recent event. It was not until the 1980s that educational research weighed in heavily in the then-emergent field of gifted studies (Friedman-Nimz, O’Brien, & Frey, 2004). About the same time, the editors of Gifted Child Quarterly (GCQ), Donald Treffinger, and later John Feldhusen, were determined to turn GCQ into a rigorous peer-reviewed research journal (A. J. Tannenbaum, 2010, personal communication). The thrust of rigorous research gave the burgeoning field hopes of bridging the gap between the theories of giftedness and practices of gifted education. However, it has yet to be materialized. A survey of the recent literature (1998–2010; Dai et al., 2011) found that the categories of psychosocial and educational research by and large are still separate. The separation is largely due to the fact that the field is mainly occupied by two groups of researchers: one trained as psychological researchers and the other as educational researchers; the two groups have limited communication with each other.

One consequence of this separation is that unless the researcher is both a theorist and practitioner (e.g., in the case of Renzulli, 1978, with his Three-Ring Conception of Giftedness and Enrichment Triad Model), new theoretical ideas rarely have the opportunity to be implemented and tried in cutting-edge research on practical innovations in gifted education. To use Ambrose et al.’s (2010) metaphor, research surveyors do not carry out the essential responsibility of bringing together theoretical expedition leaders and practitioner-colonists. A field will never rise to a status of mature profession if it lacks theory-practice coherence and integration (vertically) and intertheoretical communication and coordination (horizontally) in its theoretical and practical efforts. In other words, although hasty consensus seeking and unification may not be desirable in the field, neither is the vertical and horizontal fragmentation evident in the field (Ambrose et al., 2010).

What Makes Gifted Education Paradigmatic

A solution we propose in this book is to make our research more disciplined and paradigmatic. What we mean by paradigmatic is to make our conceptual grounding clearly spelled out so that how theoretical ideas get embodied in practice becomes explicit and subject to empirical investigation (Sternberg & Davidson, 1986). The term paradigm implies common norms and standards in practice. We consider any human practice as paradigmatic to the extent that it has a coherent set of assumptions, goals, and procedures agreed upon by a group or community of practitioners as standards of practice. Specific to gifted education, conceptual grounding involves the following four main interrelated elements, which together define the nature of a paradigm in gifted education:

• A clear assumption of the nature of giftedness and what educational needs it presents (the question of What). The question goes beyond definition issues to reflect one’s understanding of the nature, constituents, and development of the so-called gifted quality.
• A clear purpose of educational provisions and services and consequently what criteria determine the success of such services or programs (the question of Why). It is not sufficient to say that a program is effective. The question is: effective for what? Does it effectively promote excellence and realization of high potential, or does it effectively provide equitable access to opportunities for advanced learning?
• A clear delineation of the means and ends of identification (the question of Who) that is consistent with the assumption (the question of What), serves the purpose (the question of Why) of identification, and meets the criterion of predictive validity, among other considerations.
• A clear articulation of educational provisions, adaptations, or interventions to achieve the set goals (purpose) as well as assessment systems to keep track of their progress and success (the question of How).

A paradigm of practice defined by this 4W framework (What, Why, Who, and hoW [although it will appear as How throughout the book for consistency]) distinguishes itself from a scientific paradigm (Kuhn, 1962). A paradigm of research on natural phenomena is only concerned with the questions of What (ontology) and How (epistemology) and is often claimed to be universally valid. In contrast, a paradigm of educational practice goes beyond the question of What regarding the nature of learning and development involved; it addresses the normative question of why certain changes or outcomes are desirable, how these changes can be effected through education, and who will benefit from specific provisions or interventions. A paradigm of gifted education so defined needs to be representative of the canons of gifted education, but is by no means universally viable. A paradigm that specifies What, Why, Who, and How operates at a programming level (Moon & Rosselli, 2000). Figure 1.1 shows how the four components relate to one another, what we might call rhetorical structure, or simply, the logic.

Figure 1.1. Components and relationships of a paradigmatic approach to gifted education.

As indicated in Figure 1.1, the assumption of the nature of giftedness constrains, but does not dictate, purposes of gifted education. In other words, the conceptualization of purposes of gifted education has to be compatible with how giftedness is understood; however, given the same understanding of the nature of giftedness, there can be multiple ways to justify gifted education provisions, which are normative and value-laden by nature. By the same token, answers to the What, Why, and Who questions will collectively constrain answers to the How question, but there will always be multiple ways to tackle a problem, from which optimal solutions or “best practice” might emerge. The arrows in Figure 1.1 that form feedback loops from Who and How to What indicate that empirically practice can reciprocally inform theory, typically through reflection and research (see Chapter 2 for further discussion). The logic of a paradigm, which consists of a chain of reasoning connecting the four components, is judged by its coherence. The paradigmatic nature of programming dictates that the four elements form a coherent argument.

Another criterion for a paradigm of practice is its conceptual distinction, which means that assumptions, purposes, and strategies and tools fashioned in gifted programming have a distinct identity, thus they are distinguishable from other approaches. Therefore, a talent development approach can be easily identified as different from a gifted child approach, and so forth. The conceptual distinction of a particular paradigm can be mapped out in a conceptual space, as we will demonstrate in this book, and its strengths and weaknesses compared to other paradigms can be evaluated accordingly.

In addition to logical coherence and conceptual distinction, there is a third property that defines a paradigm of practice: its practical and empirical grounding, meaning that a paradigm of practice needs to be realized in particular socialcultural settings and be practically and empirically viable. This pragmatic feature makes a paradigm of practice contextually bounded rather than universal, as a scientific paradigm typically aspires to (Kuhn, 1962).

Here a distinction needs to be made between the theoretical validity of a paradigm and its practical viability under a specific social-cultural condition. It is one thing to say that a paradigm suffers from logical flaws (e.g., incoherence) and is theoretically untenable, but another to argue that a paradigm, albeit theoretically sound, is not feasible in a particular social-cultural context. For instance, we may criticize differentiated curriculum and instruction for highly able students in the regular classroom as unrealistic due to the lack of proper training for classroom teachers or lack of incentives for regular classroom teachers to practice differentiation for highly able students. But this is not the reason for discrediting it as theoretically invalid. It could be a viable option if certain practical conditions are met (e.g., well-trained classroom teachers and individualized instruction). We call the latter conditions of satisfaction, or simply, practical constraints for implementation of a paradigm.

The practical success or failure of a paradigm may depend on, among others, the following factors (from macro to micro levels):

• general sociocultural context (e.g., values held by a culture);
• local, state, and national policy (e.g., whether high-level excellence is a priority);
• institutional mission and leadership (e.g., whether there is strong leadership);
• social organization of learning (e.g., whether the system is flexible enough);
• curricular and pedagogical adaptations (e.g., effective and creative implementations);
• supporting tools and resources for particular learning activities and goals; professional development, particularly for teachers; and
• psychosocial dynamics of learning (micro-level optimal person-context fit).

A paradigm may be successful in one cultural or institutional context but failing in another, mainly because one or more of the above components may not be present or strong enough. Whether support or criticism is based on theoretical and scientific (the logic) or on practical (condition of satisfaction) grounds is an important one. Conditions of satisfaction lead to pragmatic considerations of a paradigm of practice: No matter how theoretically ideal it may be, a paradigm of practice has to be tested in practical contexts, prove applicable to a range of educational and cultural settings, and show robustness when conditions for implementation are not optimal.

Defined as such, a paradigm of practice should be distinguished from a theoretical model. A theoretical model specifies a set of causal relationships among relevant components, but does not necessarily explicate how they can be implemented in practical settings. In a sense, they remain theoretical. A case in point is Ziegler’s (2005; Ziegler & Phillipson, 2012) Actiotope Model of Giftedness. We believe that the Actiotope Model is a theoretical model, rather than a paradigm of practice. In other words, it still seems to be a theoretical model of What, with Why, Who, and How yet to be mapped out in a way grounded in practice and empirical research. A recent volume devoted to application of the Actiotope Model in Asian educational contexts (Phillipson, Stoeger, & Ziegler, 2013) pro-vides hopes that eventually it can be practically grounded and may even become an alternative paradigm of practice in gifted education that meets the three criteria specified here: logical coherence, conceptual distinction, and practical and empirical grounding.

A paradigm of practice should also be distinguished from a practical model. A paradigm operates at a more general, theoretical level, from which specific implementations or models can be derived. For example, Talent Search programs or schools specialized in arts or science are practical models that instantiate a Talent Development Paradigm. Because a paradigm operates at a more general level, multiple practical models under the same paradigm should be common: While holding their paradigmatic integrity, specific models are adaptive to available local resources, conditions, and constraints,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Case for a Paradigmatic Approach to Gifted Education
• Chapter 1 Conceptual Grounding of Gifted Education: The Essential Questions of What, Why, Who, and How
• Chapter 2 Methodological Grounding of Gifted Education: From Technical Rationality to Reflective Rationality
• Chapter 3 Three Paradigms of Gifted Education: A Historical-Theoretical Account
• Chapter 4 The Gifted Child Paradigm I: The Questions of What, Why, and Who (Research Questions 1–3)
• Chapter 5 The Gifted Child Paradigm II: The Questions of What, Why, and Who, Extended (Research Questions 4–6)
• Chapter 6 The Gifted Child Paradigm III: The Question of How (Research Questions 7–9)
• Chapter 7 The Talent Development Paradigm I: The Questions of What, Why, and Who (Research Questions 10–12)
• Chapter 8 The Talent Development Paradigm II: The Question of How (Research Questions 13–15)
• Chapter 9 The Differentiation Paradigm I: The Questions of What, Why, and Who (Research Questions 16–18)
• Chapter 10 The Differentiation Paradigm II: The Question of How (Research Questions 19–20)
• Chapter 11 Is a Unified Vision of Gifted Education Possible?: A Synthesis of the Three-Paradigm Approach to Gifted Education
• Chapter 12 Giftedness in the Making: Toward an Epistemology of Gifted Education
• References
• About the Authors
• Index