This handbook incorporates the most recent thinking and cutting-edge research from a wide range of fields related to gifted education, including developmental and social psychology, the neurosciences, cognitive science, and education. It consists of six sections: (1) History and global perspectives on the gifted field and talent development; (2)…

Successful strategies for incorporating engineering design challenges into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses in American high schools are presented in this paper. The developers have taken the position that engineering design experiences should be an important component of the high school education of all American…

Motivation and creativity are valuable attributes in the 21st century. In response, more instructional time must be focused on motivating high school students to expand their creative abilities. Self-determination theory (SDT) and communities of practice (CoP) are theoretical foundations helpful for understanding how intrinsic motivation promotes…

The "NMC Horizon Report: 2012 K-12 Edition", examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry within the environment of pre-college education. While there are many local factors affecting the practice of education, there are also issues that transcend regional boundaries and…

Taking Butler's notion of embodied performativity in relation to education and global flow, this article uses one example of Samoan cultural dance within a community arts education programme to argue the need for localised, context- and culture-specific arts pedagogies which incorporate diversity in all its expressions, suggest an emerging…

In this essay I examine what it could mean to act courageously in the midst of the troubling, disabling degree of standardization taking hold in schools. What does it take to express what I call "everyday courage"? First, there are no guarantees that one's good work will produce the outcomes one desires and is committed to realizing. I call this…

There is substantial evidence that teaching science through creative methods increases pupils' motivation and their enjoyment of science. This has been found to be particularly true for those pupils who are not always self-motivated and who find learning easier when less formal techniques are used. Drama is an excellent method of bringing…

The importance of creativity in technological design education is now clearly recognized, both in everyday understanding and also in formal curriculum guidelines. Design offers special opportunities for creativity because of the "openness" of problems (ill-defined problems, the existence of a variety of pathways to the solution, the absence of…

An exploratory study into the collaborative activity of creating a poem in early years education is reported. A group of 6-year-old children and their teacher making free-form poetry are followed for three consecutive lessons. The analytical interest is wide in scope, from looking at the process in terms of the verbal actions of the children and…

The purpose of this paper is to qualitatively examine the relationship between problem based learning, authentic assessment and the role of community in fostering learning in digital contexts. The authors used "Digital Moments" to create a meaningful learning environment and build the online class community. They then collaboratively…

Theatre-based interventions have been used in health promotion with young people to address HIV and sexual health. In this study, we explored the experience of undergraduate student performers participating in a theatre-based HIV prevention and sexual health education intervention for high school students in the USA. Undergraduate students…

The Learning and Brain Conference for 2011 featured talks on a handful of themes including creativity, technology, education tomorrow, five minds for the future and innovation. Of these, innovation took center stage. Tony Wagner's opening plenary session became the conference prologue, examining innovation from several perspectives including seven…

Both writing and math require purposeful teaching. This article describes how one teacher discovered that she could teach math in a way that paralleled how she taught writing by researching what students know and then nudging them ahead to the next level of understanding. Just as effective writers employ creativity, perseverance, and revising,…

e-Learning Projects involve the construction by final year students of e-learning resources in project work. Students are supported in a blended training course in which they acquire appropriate skills and critically review eresources of their peers This paper describes innovations in course design that have lead to the evolution of eresources…

Psychologist Robert J. Sternberg's conviction that American standardized testing does not accurately reflect a child's intelligence or potential is far from theoretical. As an elementary school student in the 1950s, he scored poorly on the ubiquitous IQ test of the time, freezing up when the school psychologist entered the room. Thankfully for…