The importance of strong educational leadership for American K-12 schools cannot be overstated. As such, school districts need to actively recruit and develop leaders. One way to do so is for school officials to become more strategic in leadership identification and development. If contemporary leaders are strategic about whom they identify and…

The Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) is an empirically validated clinical tool for assessing the learning ability of persons with intellectual disabilities and children with autism. An ABLA tester uses standardized prompting and reinforcement procedures to attempt to teach, individually, each of six tasks, called levels, to a testee,…

Gifted education is leading an interdisciplinary paradigm shift moving education out of its historic role of entrenching systemic inequities. It is a crucible for pioneering investigations of optimal human development and provides a vehicle for increasing social equity. We review changing conceptions of intelligence, motivation and creativity, and…

The augmented theory of successful intelligence [Sternberg, R. J. (2003b). "Wisdom, intelligence, and creativity synthesized." New York: Cambridge University Press] postulates that intelligence comprises creative skills in generating novel ideas; analytical skills in discerning whether they are good ideas; practical skills in implementing the…

Early identification was investigated by following the same children from kindergarten entrance through grade five. Kindergarten predictive measures were the Bender Gestalt and teachers' evaluations; followup measures were yearly standard achievement test results. (Author)

Recent research calls into question the generally accepted conclusion that people believe themselves to be better than average. This paper reviews the new theories that have been proposed to explain the fact that better-than-average effects are isolated to common behaviors and abilities, and that people believe themselves to be below average with…

Determined was the relationship between performance on a test devised to measure scientific creativity and participation in a science fair. The sample was drawn from three junior high schools and two senior high schools. The experimental group was composed of 311 students who were developing a project for a science fair. The comparison group…

The Center for Gifted and Talented Native Hawaiian Children has been developing identification methods congruent with Hawaiian values and traditional talent areas and has increased the number of native Hawaiian students identified and provided with enrichment services. This report describes efforts to combine self-report data and performance-based…

Four issues of gifted education for which more attention should be paid to the development of defensible rationales are examined, touching upon identification of the gifted, process models of gifted education, teachers of the gifted, and program evaluation. (DLS)

Because the test information function and its two modified formulas provide useful information, the reliability coefficient of a test is no longer necessary in modern mental test theory. Yet it is interesting to know how to predict the coefficient using the test information function and its modifications, tailored for each separate population of…

This chapter, published as part of an extensive report on an experimental college program for low-achieving students, provides a comprehensive review of recent research literature related to low-achievers. Organized into several sections, the review deals with literature on identifying over-and under-achievers, factors related to achievement and…

Several recently developed measurement instruments, the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB), the Comparative Guidance and Placement Program (CGP), the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (DD), the Ohio Vocational Interest Survey (OVIS), and the Gordon Occupational Check List, are considered in connection with guidance testing for occupational…

Compared the performance of 338 children on the Miller Assessment for Preschoolers (MAP) in a follow-up study, to eight indices of school functioning, including retention in school, teachers' observations, assignment to special classes or services, and report card grades. Preschoolers with low MAP scores were significantly more likely to be…

The differential validity of subject area tests of academic ability is investigated. Principal components analyses of test scores, high school grades, and college grades in English math, social studies, and natural sciences show a dominant general ability dimension and a consistent configuration of subject areas on second and third dimensions.…

This dissertation examined characteristics of educationally high risk and high potential children from kindergarten through first grade. It was designed to determine prospectively the validity of behaviorally based instruments administered during kindergarten for predicting pupils' first grade achievement. Subjects, 94 boys and 91 girls, were…