Jonathan Plucker

Johns Hopkins University | JHU · Center for Talented Youth and School of Education

The purpose of this study is to review major Chinese policies related to creativity education. We first identify and describe the role of innovation and creativity in economic and social development policies over the past 20 years, then analyze how the call for enhanced Chinese innovation and creativity was actualized in corresponding education pol...

Modern conceptions of creativity differentiate it from novelty, yet many researchers focus solely on novelty when considering contributions of research, belittling the role of replication. In this rejoinder, we respond to commentators while augmenting arguments for replication, clarifying how it differs from meta-analysis, and providing examples of...

A recent study in the USA documented the existence and growth of “excellence gaps” among students. These gaps are similar to the minimum competency achievement gaps that proliferate in policy discussions in many Western countries, but excellence gaps focus on the highest level of achievement rather than minimum competency. We extend this research u...

Recent controversies in psychology have spurred conversations about the nature and quality of psychological research. One topic receiving substantial attention is the role of replication in psychological science. Using the complete publication history of the 100 psychology journals with the highest 5-year impact factors, the current article provide...

This article argues that one possible avenue for addressing and increasing student body diversity in charter schools may lie with the authorizer. In particular, we focus on the role of university-based authorizers, a group of sponsors that would appear to be especially concerned with educational opportunity given their faculties’ traditional concer...

In recent years, state and local support for academic acceleration has created opportunities for students with advanced learning needs to move through their education at a pace that matches their abilities and may be faster than their same-age peers. As a result, it is not uncommon for exceptionally bright students to complete their high school gra...

Artificial intelligence (AI), which enables machines to learn to perform a task by training on diverse datasets, is one of the most revolutionary developments in scientific history. Although AI and especially deep learning is relatively new, it has already had transformative impact on medicine, biology, transportation, entertainment, and beyond. As...

Using TIMSS 2019 mathematics data, we investigated the variance in achievement within U.S. fourth and eighth-grade classrooms. Approximately 23% of students in a typical grade four classroom are expected to score at or below the low benchmark whereas 14% meet or exceed the advanced benchmark; these numbers are 35% and 14% for grade eight classrooms...

The goal of gifted education is to serve the needs of individuals with high potential and advanced ability. However, the term “gifted” can create barriers in the minds of the public and policymakers, effectively framing these advanced learning opportunities as inequitable and inaccessible. Excellence gaps, or differences in advanced performance amo...

Social, Psychological, Academic, Environmental, and Cognitive Supports for Gifted Students’ Scale

Previous studies on poverty within the gifted population have shown that economically vulnerable gifted students are underrepresented in gifted programs. Moreover, the majority of published studies on this topic were conducted in Western cultures. We explored the psychological, cognitive, academic, social, and environmental supports for economicall...

Previous studies on poverty within the gifted population have shown that economically vulnerable gifted students are underrepresented in gifted programs. Moreover, the majority of published studies on this topic were conducted in Western cultures. We explored the psychological, cognitive, academic, social, and environmental supports for economicall...

Replication is a key activity in scientific endeavors. Yet explicit replications are rare in many fields, including education and psychology. In this article, we discuss the relevance and value of replication in educational psychology and analyze challenges regarding the role replications can and should play in research. These challenges include ph...

Concerns about the conduct of research are pervasive in many fields, including education. In this preregistered study, we replicated and extended previous studies from other fields by asking education researchers about 10 questionable research practices and five open research practices. We asked them to estimate the prevalence of the practices in t...

Due in large part to technological advances, society has changed in unprecedented ways and at a breakneck pace. Yet conceptions of giftedness and models for gifted education have not kept pace with these changes. One conceptual change widely applied to other fields is the use of sociocultural theories, which are rarely applied to the study of and e...

Talent development plans are well-articulated representations of a district’s or school’s advanced learning opportunities. These plans show how a bright student progresses through the available programming and provide families with information about their child’s options and opportunities. In addition to reviewing the basic pieces of a talent devel...

In the 21st century, what does a defensible, equitable model of gifted and talented student identification look like? For too long, gifted education’s reason for being has been unclear, and the students it has served have been from too narrow a segment of the student population. With renewed attention to equity and personalized learning, gifted edu...

There is substantial evidence on the effectiveness of many forms of advanced education, especially various approaches to acceleration, ability grouping, and curricular innovations such as structured curriculum and enrichment. Nonetheless, additional research on the ways in which advanced education impacts the learning and lives of students across t...

Replicability and the importance of enhanced research rigor are foundational issues across the social sciences, and educational psychology is no exception. Yet strategies for increasing research quality are not widespread in the field, including the use of replication studies. In this manuscript, we examine the nature and scope of replication probl...

Discussions of how to improve research quality are predominant in a number of fields, including education. But how prevalent are the use of problematic practices and the improved practices meant to counter them? This baseline information will be a critical data source as education researchers seek to improve our research practices. In this preregis...

Despite considerable reform activity surrounding K-12 education over the last 20 years, racialand socioeconomic disparities among students who achieve at advanced levels have receivedlittle attention. This study examined how excellence gaps, defined as differences in performanceat the 90th percentile of subgroups, change over time and their potenti...

Este manifiesto, discutido por 20 académicos y académicas que representan diversas líneas de investigación sobre la creatividad, marca un cambio conceptual dentro de los estudios de este campo. Los enfoques socioculturales han hecho contribuciones sustanciales al concepto de creatividad en las últimas décadas y hoy pueden proporcionar un conjunto d...

Despite considerable reform activity surrounding K-12 education over the past 20 years, racial and socioeconomic disparities among students who achieve at advanced levels have received little attention. This study examined how excellence gaps, defined as differences in performance at the 90th percentile of subgroups, change over time and their pote...

Gough’s Creative Personality Scale (CPS) has been very widely used to assess creative personality characteristics, and many researchers have argued that it is associated with strong reliability and validity evidence. However, findings vary considerably across the samples used in each study, suggesting that an analysis using the item response theory...

Meeting the intellectual needs of high-ability students does not end upon graduation from high school. However, limited attention is paid to the important topic of postsecondary advanced learning in the research literature. In this systematic review, we identified 52 empirical studies published during the past 15 years. Results suggest various cogn...

The Center for Open Science (COS) will create an ECR Data Resource Hub to facilitate rigorous and reproducible research practices such as data sharing and study registration. The Hub will integrate training materials, infrastructure, community engagement, and innovation in research to advance rigorous research skills and behavior across the STEM ed...

Creativity, as one of the key 21st century skills, has become increasingly important. Yet despite the huge volume of research on creativity in the past 60 years, a fundamental debate about the nature of creativity still remains unsolved: Is creativity domain specific or domain general? In the present study, multilevel explanatory item response theo...

Educators have sought to understand and address the disproportional representation of students from certain student subgroups in gifted education. Most gifted identification decisions are made with national comparisons where students must score above a certain percentage of test takers. However, this approach is not always consistent with the overa...

The past half-decade has seen the applied sciences in the throes of acute growing pains. In what has become known as the replication crisis, widespread failures to replicate prior findings have shaken several fields, including medicine, psychology, management, and economics. Fortunately, the systemic problems brought to light by the replication cri...

We examined the applicability of the hybrid model of creativity, which specifies distinct domains that all express an underlying general creativity factor, in data from representative samples from Central Russia and the North Caucasus (N = 2,046). Using multigroup confirmatory analysis, Study 1 supported the invariance of a model with the six unifa...

Although a theoretical link between positive schizotypy and heightened creativity has been established in the literature, little empirical research has been conducted to examine the underlying cognitive processes that contribute to this association. In addition, previous studies found a negative relationship between positive schizotypy and cognitiv...

Creativity is increasingly identified as a key educational outcome at the local, regional, and national levels in several countries. Yet one key issue about the nature of creativity remains controversial: Whether creativity is domain specific or domain general. Resolving this issue would significantly impact the way creativity is identified, nurtur...

Creativity has been identified by many as an important indicator of giftedness. In this chapter, we provide an introduction to the field of creativity. The chapter begins with a definition of creativity, followed by classic theories that reflect the history of creativity research. We then review and critique creativity assessments, an area of the f...

This study investigated change in divergent thinking (DT), an indicator of creative potential, at two gender-specific residential summer camps. Additionally, this study examined whether the change in DT varied by gender and by the type of activities campers self-select. Quantitative methods, using a quasi-experimental design was used in order to un...

An emphasis on design thinking is increasingly prevalent in both professional and educational settings. From maker spaces to prototyping labs to the infusion of creative design thinking into K-12 instruction, principles of design thinking are making their way into a range of educational contexts and interventions. Many of these initiatives are base...

The past 50 years have seen a tremendous strengthening of the field of creativity studies. Developments over the past couple decades, in particular, have led to a burgeoning science of creativity. But major methodological and substantive issues remain and must be addressed in order for the science of creativity to reach its potential to improve the...

The number of economically vulnerable students in the United States is large and growing. In this article, we examine income-based excellence gaps and describe recent controversies in the definition and measurement of poverty, with an eye toward their application to gifted education and meeting the needs of talented, economically vulnerable student...

As the awareness of the existence and negative effects of excellence gaps has grown among educators and policy makers, so too has a desire for research-supported interventions to reduce these gaps. A recent review of research related to promoting equitable outcomes for all gifted students identified six specific strategies for reducing excellence g...

Replication is a hallmark of science. In recent years, some medical sciences and behavioral sciences struggled with what came to be known as replication crises. As a field, criminology has yet to address formally the threats to our evidence base that might be posed by large-scale and systematic replication attempts, although it is likely we would f...

The question of whether gifted students learn differently from other students has long plagued the psychology and education communities. On the one hand, the field of gifted education has promoted special programs that capitalize on gifted children's individual abilities and needs. At the same time, evidence from rigorous studies has supported the...

Five possible relationships between creativity and intelligence have been proposed, with empirical support for each relationship. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between these constructs with a Korean sample. Previous research with Asian samples provides evidence of more overlap between creativity and intelligence impl...

Few topics have garnered more attention in preservice teacher training and educational reform than student diversity and its influence on learning. However, the actual degree of cognitive diversity has yet to be considered regarding instructional implications for advanced learners. We used four data sets (three state-level and one national) from di...

Policy research in gifted education has occurred at much lower rates than other areas of research within the field, such as identification and talent development. However, without changes and implementation of these policies, systematic change is unlikely to occur. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to argue that policy research should be a...

The work of Confucius has been—and continues to be—part of the foundation of Chinese culture. Understanding his work provides insights into many aspects of Chinese societies, ranging from politics to the arts, from economies to education systems. The present article summarizes Confucius’ view of human intelligence, comparing and contrasting it with...

The purpose of this study was to conduct a cross-cultural, conceptual replication of the study reported in Beghetto, Kaufman, and Baxter (2011), which examined the relationship between elementary students’ creative self-efficacy (CSE) beliefs, their demographic characteristics, and teacher ratings of students’ creative expression during science ins...

Competition, a topic closely associated with outstanding performance, continues to be a contentious topic (Bonta, 1997; Murayama & Elliot, 2012a, 2012b), particularly in the realm of education and schooling (D. W. Johnson & Johnson, 1987, 2009). Is competition a useful or detrimental strategy for promoting outstanding performance? Does competition...

The deregulation movement has impacted the social, political, and economic landscape in the United States and continues to do so. In this article, we briefly summarize the general history of deregulation in this country and the meaning of deregulation within the specific context of education policy and reform. We focus on deregulation efforts desig...

Increased calls for rigor in special education have often revolved around the use of experimental research design. However, the replicability of research results is also a central tenet to the scientific research process. To assess the prevalence, success rate, and authorship history of replications in special education, we investigated the complet...

Gifted students’ learning gains result from complex, advanced, and meaningful content provided by a knowledgeable teacher through high-quality curriculum and instruction at an appropriate pace with scaffolding and feedback. These elements exert influence that increases with dosage and within structures that facilitate student engagement in rigorous...

Learning motivation has a significant effect on student learning, which is a key determinant of academic performance and creativity. It is increasingly popular and important to cultivate learning motivation in schools. To consider this trend, a long-term intervention program named “Learn to Think” (LTT) was designed not only to improve students’ th...

Although many disciplines within the social sciences have been strongly influenced over the past two decades by sociocultural perspectives, notably education with its emphasis on the learning sciences, research on talent and, more specifically, creativity and entrepreneurship has seen relatively little sociocultural influence. In this chapter, we t...

The relationship between creativity and intelligence is a frequent topic of research and debate in the social sciences. In this chapter, we use Sternberg’s framework for examining the definitions of creativity and intelligence and how they may be related. Sternberg’s model suggests five possible relationships: Creativity as a subset of intelligence...

Current technology has dramatically increased the prevalence of studies to establish the genetic correlates of a wide variety of human characteristics, including not only the physical attributes that determine what we look like and the risk of physiological disease but also the psychological and cognitive characteristics that often define who we ar...

This methodological brief introduces readers to replication methods and their uses. Broadly defined, replication is the duplication of previously conducted research to verify or expand the original findings. Replication is particularly useful in the gifted education context because so much education theory and research are based on general educatio...

The relationship between intelligence and creativity is often discussed and debated, and it has significant implications for education, student development, and the workplace. We use Sternberg’s framework for understanding intelligence-creativity work to examine research on this important topic, with an emphasis on several recent studies that exemp...

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