The 13-item Chinese Creative Writing Scale was modified from the Carlson Originality Scale to assess creativity elements in compositions of primary school students (n=69) in Hong Kong. Content validity was endorsed by an expert panel and results show the scale has excellent interrater reliability and moderate to good internal consistency.…

Township High School District 214 in Illinois has developed a gifted program that provides curricular options that meet students' needs in their talent areas and supports life and career planning. This article describes the program's philosophy, student identification, curricular and co-curricular programs, life and career planning efforts, and…

The education of gifted children in Italy is discussed and past and present research on the topic is reviewed. The role of cultural values in educational policy decisions for gifted children and for community institutions is analyzed, along with efforts to construct a new identification of gifted optimal human development. (Contains extensive…

A study explored whether the 95th percentile qualifying score cutoff in use by the Elementary Student Talent Search was appropriate for 2,926 third to sixth graders who took the EXPLORE test. Results indicated participants earn EXLORE scores that are approximately normally distributed and that they compare favorably to eighth-grade norms.…

Talent searches for seventh and eighth graders have extensive empirical support, and the model has been successfully extended to elementary students. Research has focused on participants earning high scores on above-level tests, however, not typical participants. Here, 597 families and 93 schools that participated in the Carnegie Mellon Institute…

Identifying low-progress readers easily and quickly is an essential prerequisite for effective literacy intervention in schools. In this study, teacher judgment of reading performance is compared with a curriculum-based measurement procedure. This study involved 33 teachers and their Year 3 to Year 5 classes. Twelve students were randomly selected…

The purpose of this study was to identify common and domain-specific cognitive characteristics of gifted students based on an integrated model of human abilities. This study is based on the premise that abilities identified by tests can appear as observable characteristics in test or school situations. Abilities proposed by major models of…

The Early Development Index (EDI) is a teacher-completed checklist, intended to be a population-level tool to measure children's readiness for school and to alert communities to potential developmental problems in children. In response to the increasing popularity of the EDI, this paper provides a critical and timely evaluation and identifies the…

This report describes research on the portfolio process that the Oceanside (California) Unified School District uses to identify and plan instruction for students in the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program. The report is based on interviews conducted with educators in two elementary schools that participated in the GATE curriculum,…

This digest offers guidelines to parents of gifted children which emphasize respecting the child's individuality while providing necessary support. A new definition of giftedness is cited which stresses the asynchronous development of such children's cognitive skills and the resultant qualitatively different inner experience. Early signs of…

This brief paper offers guidelines on recognizing giftedness in young children based on a study of the developmental characteristics of 77 gifted and average children as reported in parent questionnaires. The questionnaire asked parents to describe their children's development during the first 36 months. Major findings indicated that: parents of…

EXCEL is an enrichment program for highly able students in grades K-2, designed to provide a nontraditional method of identifying young gifted and talented students, especially economically disadvantaged students, as well as to increase the ability of classroom teachers and parents to develop the potential of these students. EXCEL utilizes a…

This report describes the strategies, accomplishments, and outcomes of a project designed to identify intermediate level disadvantaged rural gifted children and develop curriculum practices appropriate for their use. Project objectives are outlined, along with evidence of their accomplishment. Findings of the project include: (1) the…

The Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council developed a Volunteer Evaluation System. Its objective was to create a way to gain knowledge of volunteers' skills and place them in appropriate volunteer positions. A five-step system was created to collect information about volunteers at set intervals and pass it along to appropriate staff members. The…

The author describes a Career Direction program designed to teach people how to identify their talents for themselves and how to link these talents to career fields that use them best. Talent identification by the individual coupled with career analysis is proposed as a lifelong guideline for making career decisions. (SJL)