ChapterPDF Available

Research on Giftedness in the 21st Century

January 2009

In book: International Handbook on Giftedness (pp.1509-1524)

Authors:

Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg

First, the question of what giftedness research is is briefly dealt with. Afterward, the issue of whether present rationalizations for the existence of this field of research can remain justified is discussed. Particular attention is given to justifications concerning the individual needs of the gifted and the needs of society regarding specific contributions by gifted persons. Following this the probability that giftedness research will be displaced by one or both of its major rivals is examined to determine whether possible synergies with expertise research and innovation research can be expected in the future. Although this question can be positively answered from the perspective of giftedness research, the accuracy of the answer is decisively dependent on the degree to which the field is able to master the major challenges of the 21st century. This point is illustrated through the allegory of the Tower of Creativity. In conclusion a three-point summation of the contribution is drawn up. KeywordsTower of Creativity–Giftedness research–Expertise research–Innovation research–Creativity

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Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

Part XIV

Conclusions

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

Chapter 78

Research on Giftedness in the 21st Century

Albert Ziegler

Abstract First, the question of what giftedness re-

search is is brieﬂy dealt with. Afterward, the issue of

whether present rationalizations for the existence of

this ﬁeld of research can remain justiﬁed is discussed.

Particular attention is given to justiﬁcations concerning

the individual needs of the gifted and the needs of soci-

ety regarding speciﬁc contributions by gifted persons.

Following this the probability that giftedness research

will be displaced by one or both of its major rivals

is examined to determine whether possible synergies

with expertise research and innovation research can be

expected in the future. Although this question can be

positively answered from the perspective of giftedness

research, the accuracy of the answer is decisively de-

pendent on the degree to which the ﬁeld is able to mas-

ter the major challenges of the 21st century. This point

is illustrated through the allegory of the Tower of Cre-

ativity. In conclusion a three-point summation of the

contribution is drawn up.

Keywords Tower of Creativity ·Giftedness research ·

Expertise research ·Innovation research ·Creativity

Introduction

The converse to scientiﬁc examinations of past events

is futurology. This branch of science investigates

possible, probable, and desirable developments in the

future. An investigative topic, prevalent in the ﬁeld,

addresses future systems of raising and educating chil-

dren and the theoretical models associated with them

A. Ziegler (B)

University of Ulm, Ulm, Baden-W¨

urttemberg, Germany

(Kreibich, 2006). This chapter will therefore form

the counterpart to the contribution made by Stoeger

(in this book), which deals with the history of gifted

education. It also differs from the chapter composed

by Shaughnessy and Persson (in this volume), which

addresses trends in gifted education. Here, the main

concern is the future of giftedness research in the 21st

century.

Futurology is based on scientiﬁc methods (Fowles,

1978). The results they generate, and extrapolations on

these results, are reﬂections of existing trends as well

as the personal opinions of the researchers themselves.

In this chapter I will primarily draw on the comprehen-

sive prior works of the scientists contributing to this

book. Then, of course, the prognoses presented in this

chapter are also a reﬂection of my personal subjective

assessments of how giftedness research will evolve in

the 21st century.

What Is Giftedness Research?

If one would like to throw light on the future of

giftedness research, one must ﬁrst clarify the question

of what exactly should be illuminated. In other words,

What is giftedness research? This poses an indeed

serious problem: There is no generally accepted

deﬁnition of giftedness research.1It is clear that it

lies on the intersection of various disciplines, among

them are educational science, psychology, sociology,

1In the following I will use the terms “gifted,” “gift,” and “gift-

edness” exclusively. The concept associated with these terms is

often also referred to with synonymously applied terms such as

“talents” or “abilities.”

L.V. Shavinina (ed.), International Handbook on Giftedness,1509

DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-6162-2 78, c

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

1510 A. Ziegler

anthropology, biology, and history. Its individual

character results from the object of its research,

which brings up even more problems. The ambiguity

concerning what is meant by giftedness research

is easily matched by that of its namesake gift (for

interesting and stimulating chapters on the nature

of giftedness, see Dai; Davidson; Ericsson; Gagn´

Hertzog; Shavinina; Sayler; Silverman & Miller).

These problems are mirrored in the identiﬁcation

and assessment of the gifted. Despite tremendous

progress over the last decades and promising new

approaches (see the excellent chapters on assessment

and identiﬁcation of giftedness by Silverman; Lohman;

Brody; Shavinina) we are still far away from a con-

sensus on how to best identify the gifted. One reason

for this is that gifts are not to be considered among

the so-called natural concepts like the sun, trees, or

oxygen. Therefore, as an investigative object, it is not

simply given but is rather constructed by the researcher

him/herself. Naturally, considerable deviations are

found between one researcher and another. For ex-

ample, there is a huge dissent concerning the rather

elementary problem of determining how many gifted

persons are among us. According to Terman (1925)

this would be the top 1% of the population; according

to Robinson (2005) the top 1–3% percent; according

to Brody and Stanley (2005) the top 3%; according

to Freeman (2005) the top 5–10%; according to

Gagn´

e (2005) the top 10%; according to Gordon

and Bridglall (2005) the top 15%; and according to

Renzulli (2005) the top 15–20%. In comparing the

rather conservative percentage rates given by Terman

and Robinson with the more generous percentage

rates quoted by Gordon and Bridglall or Renzulli, one

ﬁnds that the latter estimates the proportion of gifted

persons to be more than 1,000% (sic!) greater than the

former. Since researchers do not formulate deﬁnitions

randomly, but rather with intent, one can assume that

these researchers are not referring to the same thing

when they are speaking of gifted persons or gifts.

As long as the object being examined by giftedness

research is not clear, and considerable deviations con-

tinue to exist, a standard deﬁnition along the lines of

“Giftedness research is a scientiﬁc discipline which de-

scribes and explains the organization, structure, con-

ditions for establishment, and inﬂuences of gifts” is

insufﬁcient. This may, at ﬁrst, come across as rather

sparse, but there is a way out. Giftedness is a rela-

tional concept, in other words gifted persons are gifted

at some speciﬁc thing (e.g., music, physics, academics,

chess). This allows us to identify the object, as is simi-

larly the case with objects in several other ﬁelds of sci-

ence (e.g., gravitation, energy), by means of its effects.2

Fortunately, there is a wide consensus among gifted-

ness researchers concerning the relational meaning of

gifts; that gifts are involved, in a non-trivial manner, in

the establishment of achievement excellence and inno-

vations. Non-trivial means that they can be considered

as causes. The deﬁnition of the investigative object of

giftedness research could therefore read

Giftedness research is a scientiﬁc discipline addressing

the organization, structure, conditions for the establish-

ment, and inﬂuences of the causes of achievement excel-

lence and innovations.

Applied giftedness research would accordingly be

the scientiﬁc discipline that addresses the application

of the results of giftedness research to encourage

achievement excellence and innovations.

Justiﬁcation for Giftedness Research:

Individual and Social Perspectives

Almost all of the researchers contributing to this book

have explicitly or implicitly stated that giftedness re-

search will remain meaningful and signiﬁcant in the

future. Of course, part of this optimism is owing to

the fact that one of its main objectives, gifted educa-

tion, is ubiquitously perceived as one of the most im-

portant challenges of the 21st century (see the chap-

ters on giftedness research and gifted education around

the world by de Alencar & Arancibia; Maree, Bester,

& van der Westhuizen; Matthews; M¨

onks & Chandler;

Noble & Childers; Subhi; Tsai et al.; Warwick), a point

which has brought some nations to make or to consider

deliberate societal adjustments to meet this challenge

(see, as examples, the chapters by Van Tassel-Baska on

gifted education policy; by Karnes & Stephens on legal

issues; and the chapter by Carroll, Crowe, Earle, Or-

land, Moon, Ross, & Subotnik on the development of

national strategic agendas). As giftedness research has,

in the past, made a tremendous contribution to the edu-

cation of the gifted (implementations in regular educa-

tional settings, constant improvement, evaluation, etc.),

2It is important to note that the effects allow for the identiﬁca-

tion of gifts, but do not deﬁne them. They only point reliably to

the object of research.

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

78 Research on Giftedness in the 21st Century 1511

it seems to be the natural ally of gifted education (see

the stimulating chapters on recent advances in gifted

education and how they are built on research ﬁndings

by Baldus, Assouline, Croft, & Colangelo; Colangelo

& Assouline; Cramond; Davis; Eyre; Ferrari; Heng &

Tam; Pyryt; Renzulli & Reis; Sriraman & Dahl; Van

Tassel-Baska; Wallace & Maker; and the two chapters

by Shavinina). However, many questions have yet to be

answered and many problems are not well understood

presently (see, for example, the chapters on individual

differences, personality, and gender by Friedman-Nimz

& Skyba; Piechowski, Jackson, & Frankfourth Moyle;

Reis & Sullivan; Se¸kowski, Sieka´

nska, & Klinkosz; see

also the chapters on metacognition by Shore, Irving, &

Redden; on gifted motivation by Gottfried & Gottfried;

on twice-exceptional gifted students by Lupart & Toy,

on the dropout problem by Matthews; and on suicidal

behavior of gifted students by Cross & Hyatt). How-

ever, the lack of research ﬁndings is, of course, a strong

argument for more, not for less, research.

A closer inspection of all the arguments in favor of

a ﬂourishing future for giftedness research shows that

they can be broken down to two basic arguments. In

the ﬁrst place, there is a strong emphasis on the right

each person has to reach his/her full potential. This

also applies to the gifted. To ensure and implement this

right, knowledge, i.e., research is needed (see, for ex-

ample, the introductory chapter by Shavinina as well as

the chapters by Gross; Friedman-Nimz & Skyba; Cross

& Hyatt; Van Tassel-Baska; Carroll, Crowe, Earle, Or-

land, Moon, Ross, & Subotnik; Karnes & Stephens). In

the second place, society has a well-justiﬁed, high de-

gree of interest in encouraging its cleverest and most

creative members in the best possible way. This is

shown plainly in all the chapters on domain-speciﬁc

and multiple giftedness in this book (see the chapters

by Shavinina on Nobel laureates; Phillipson & Calling-

ham on mathematics; Simonton on cinema; Schnur &

Marmor on reading and writing; Persson on music; van

Rossum on sport; Shavinina on entrepreneurial gifted-

ness; Heinzen & Picciano on information technology;

Porath on the gifted educator; Shavinina on managerial

talent; Root-Bernstein on polymaths; see also the chap-

ters by Bar-On & Maree on emotional and social gift-

edness; Rogers on leadership). Nations which have the

expertise to succeed in helping their talents to tap their

full potential in these domains insure not only prosper-

ity but also social, cultural, scientiﬁc as well as eco-

nomic progress (Heller & Ziegler, 2007).

Although the ﬁrst argument should already sufﬁce

that giftedness research will continue to play a signif-

icant role, one should avoid building hopes on illu-

sions. To put it bluntly, there is next to no doubt that

the amount of funds made available to giftedness re-

search during the 21st century will be decisively de-

pendent on how convincingly the second argument can

be defended by, and empirically conﬁrmed through,

giftedness research. Findings, such as those by Simon-

ton (1988, 2004), that persons demonstrating achieve-

ment excellence proliferate innovations at a rate which

is widely overproportional, are helpful. However, the

fact that, over the course of about one century, gift-

edness research has not been able to identify one sin-

gle Nobel Prize winner or recipient of a Field Medal,

among the millions of children assessed, is harmful.

Even more damaging is that future Nobel Prize winners

have been excluded from samples of gifted children on

the basis of insufﬁcient talent, as was the case for No-

bel Prize winners Shockley and Alvarez who were both

rejected by the Terman study (Terman & Oden, 1959).

I do not want to be misunderstood here. By no means

am I asserting that giftedness research is not capable of

justifying its own existence. What I would much rather

like to emphasize is that it has not yet been able to

achieve this. There is still, worldwide, no gifted pro-

gram or gifted school whose former students are con-

sistently admitted to National Academies of Sciences

or regularly compete for Nobel Prizes, Field Medals,

or prominent literature prizes, etc. Instead, giftedness

research has been characterized by two unpleasant de-

velopments.

First, at the current time, giftedness research

is hardly acknowledged by its parent disciplines.

This is no exaggeration when one considers that the

articles published in the three empirical journals on

giftedness with the highest citation impact (Gifted

Child Quarterly, High Ability Studies, Journal for the

Education of the Gifted) are hardly ever found in the

reference lists in the correspondent journals for the

ﬁelds of educational and developmental psychology,

educational science, sociology, etc. Furthermore, it is

disconcerting that the topic of giftedness barely plays

a role in the leading journals of these parent disci-

plines. Articles on talent are sought in vain in these

publications. Also alarming is that giftedness research

has, in the last two decades, not been able to supply

its parent disciplines with new investigative questions.

Giftedness research is largely receptive, even to the

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

1512 A. Ziegler

point of being pushed into the sidelines. However,

despite this gloomy appraisal of the current situation,

I am personally convinced that giftedness research

is actually predestined to become the drosophila of

its parent disciplines in the 21st century: Its main

topics are successful learning processes and successful

development processes, which are a precondition for

excellence and innovation. The results of giftedness

research are, therefore, capable of offering excellent

models of effective learning, efﬁcient child rearing,

and effective socialization for the design of optimally

stimulating learning environments, etc. In my view it

is mandatory for giftedness research to internalize this

self-perception as a scientiﬁc pacesetter, instead of

almost exclusively applying concepts derived from its

parent disciplines.

The second, and only at ﬁrst sight more unpleasant

development, is that giftedness research is faced with

two powerful scientiﬁc rivals in the form of expertise

research and innovation research. Of course, gifted-

ness research since Terman (1925) has successfully ab-

sorbed a large number of theoretical advances. David-

son (in this volume) mentions, for example, the change

from models based purely on intelligence to models of

multiple talents. Here one can further differentiate be-

tween purely additive models (Renzulli, 1986; Stern-

berg, 2003) and stochastic models (e.g., Gagn´

e, 2004).

As this is subjected to more comprehensive review in

other chapters of this book (see the chapters by Dai,

Phillipson, Stoeger) I will not elaborate further. How-

ever, since expertise research and innovation research

will continue to have a strong and enduring inﬂuence

on further theoretical development in giftedness re-

search, I will go into greater detail here.

Giftedness Research and Its Most

Important Rivals

Giftedness Research and Expertise

Research

In the 1970s giftedness research obtained forceful

impulses from the expertise approach to giftedness

(Gruber & Ziegler, 1996; Ericsson, Nandagopal, &

Roring, 2005). In contrast to giftedness research,

which at the time focused primarily on the char-

acteristics and learning potentials of the gifted and

talented as prerequisites for exceptional performance,

expertise research generated its objectives from a fully

disparate direction. Experts, according to the widely

inﬂuential deﬁnition developed by Posner (1988),

are persons who exhibit durable, and not only sin-

gular, extraordinary achievements (see also Ericsson,

Charness, Feltovich, & Hoffman, 2006). Naturally,

this perspective was not alien to giftedness research.

For example, biographical analyses of the lives of

eminent persons are among their core competencies

(e.g., Gruber, 1981, 1998; Shavinina, 2004; Simon-

ton, 2004). However, what was new here was, ﬁrst, the

radical rejection of a purely psychometric approach

and a strong accentuation on the cognitive–scientiﬁc

elements associated with it. In fact, it was now clear

that giftedness research had been overly concentrated

on traits for a long period of time (with certain

exceptions such as Kholodnaya (1993), Shavinina

and Kholodnaya (1996), Shore and Kanevsky (1993),

and Sternberg (1986), just to mention a few). For

example, Kholodnaya (1993) criticized the person-

ality trait approach in the psychology of giftedness

and insisted on the change in a research paradigm.

Vekker (1981) demonstrated that study of any psy-

chological phenomena is not productive if it based

on the study of its own traits. Crises in psychology

testify to it. Moreover, Shavinina (1995) speciﬁcally

criticized the trait approach and demonstrated that

traits of the gifted are results of their unique cog-

nitive experience. Without doubt, one of the major

weaknesses in the ﬁeld was its neglect of cogni-

tive psychology and, above all, aspects of learning

(Sternberg, 1985; Ziegler, 2005). Again, exceptions

exist. For example, Kholodnaya (1993), Shavinina

and Kholodnaya (1996), Shore and Kanevsky (1993),

and Sternberg (1986), just to mention a few, studied

cognitive processes in the gifted. Also new was the

deﬁnition of the research objective through per-

formance and no longer through persons and their

traits.

Giftedness research accepted these stimulations

gratefully – despite isolated pockets of skepticism –

and developed them further. Elegant conceptions of

giftedness were proposed which united the beneﬁts of

both approaches. For example, the Munich Model of

Giftedness developed by Heller (see Heller, Perleth,

& Lim, 2005) and in particular the very inﬂuential

DMGT by Gagn´

e (2004; see the chapter in this

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

78 Research on Giftedness in the 21st Century 1513

book). The explanatory potential of these models

widely surpasses that of the giftedness conceptions

they displaced. Individually, these attempts at reform

were so wide reaching that even the most innate

concepts of giftedness research were reinterpreted to

better serve expertise research. Noteworthy among

them was Sternberg’s renowned hypothesis, in which

talents were redeﬁned in terms of developing expertise

(Sternberg, 1999). As a giftedness researcher, one

may debate whether or not in such hypotheses the

relationship between giftedness and expertise research

has been able to ﬁnd an optimal point of balance.

However, the innovative capacity of giftedness re-

search and its potential to solidify a fruitful synthesis

can, in retrospect, hardly be subjected to serious doubt.

For example, not only were learning aspects integrated

more deeply but also a developmental perspective sur-

faced, which led to a new sense of dynamism from the

perspective of giftedness research (see Gagn´

e, 2005;

M¨

onks, 1992; M¨

onks & Mason, 2000; Subotnik, 2003;

see also the chapters by Gross; Moltzen; Perleth &

Wilde).

Giftedness Research and Innovation

Research

For several years a new ﬁeld of research has been de-

veloping which will be able to stimulate the ﬁeld of

giftedness research to the same new heights that ex-

pertise research has been able to encourage: innovation

research. As a telling sign of the thriving nature of this

new branch of research, Shavinina published the In-

ternational Handbook on Innovation in 2003, wherein

several of the central ﬁgures in this investigative ﬁeld

have been gathered (Shavinina, 2003).

A giftedness researcher who closely examines the

concepts and issues surrounding innovation research

cannot escape the impression that giftedness research

is standing at the threshold of another change in its

basic paradigm. We have previously mentioned that

giftedness research has long deﬁned its research object

through persons and their characteristics, and expertise

research has focused primarily on achievements.

These achievements, however, have always been

accomplished by persons. Innovation research has

completely ﬁltered persons out of the deﬁnition of

their research object. They pursue their investigations

by starting off with innovative products. As a conse-

quence, they are treading on ground very familiar to

the ﬁeld of giftedness research. Researchers here have

investigated the innovations produced by exceptional

personalities such as Mozart or Edison, as well as

the conditions for the generation of inventions, mas-

terpieces, creative achievements (e.g., Gruber, 1998;

Shavinina, 2004). However, a brief glance through the

index of the handbook published by Shavinina would

be rather jolting for a giftedness researcher. Excluding

the 20-page chapter by giftedness researcher Renzulli,

which Shavinina refers to in the introduction as

“the chapter where an author was given an explicit

assignment,” the central terms in giftedness research

are blatantly absent from the subject index of the

volume! In the remaining 1092 pages of the handbook

the term “Giftedness” has only one single reference,

and the terms “Talent,” “Ability,” and “Intelligence”

are not referred to once. How can it be that the terms

central to the basic constructs of giftedness research

are virtually ignored in innovation research, although

the objects of these two branches of research should

be widely overlapping? In my opinion, this is due to

three tendencies in innovation research, all of which

are clearly portrayed in the handbook. I hope that the

ﬁrst two will prove to inspire similar movements in

giftedness research; as to the third, I am personally

concerned that it is bound to provide detrimental

inﬂuences for giftedness research in the 21st century.

(1) In innovation research, innovations are clearly

understood as cooperative efforts among persons, in

other words as the result of a team. And is it not true

that current major discoveries are primarily being made

by effective research groups? The extension of this per-

spective away from the individual and to the group is

particularly well illustrated by Cooper’s (2003) work

on product innovations. According to his assessment

of the ﬁeld’s research objective, the introduction of

a new product results from cooperative efforts span-

ning a number of different functional areas: Market re-

search, research and design, marketing and sales, etc.

Although it is quite apparent that the speciﬁc talents of

an individual employee can be established as a trace

element of the entire success of an innovative product,

this contribution cannot expect to be particularly potent

in consideration of the number of persons involved in

the entire process. Furthermore, one must also keep in

mind that the end users, or consumers, always have a

say in the ultimate establishment of an innovation. This

in itself certainly does not justify a general neglect of

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

1514 A. Ziegler

the central constructs of giftedness research, however

incomprehensible this may be from the perspective of

innovation research.

(2) The accent which is placed on interdisciplinary

orientation in innovation research is remarkable. This

can be detected on three levels. First, the profes-

sional background of these researchers is varied and

stretches from economics over historical research and

psychology to neurophysiology. Of course, giftedness

research has caught up in recent years and these

sciences are also well represented in giftedness re-

search (see for example the exciting chapters about the

neuropsychology of giftedness by Geake; Kalbﬂeisch;

Vandervert & Liu). Nevertheless, the interdisciplinary

nature of innovation research is not only reﬂected by

the opportunity for a meeting of the minds among

researchers stemming from the most disparate of areas.

It is also evident in the fact that in single studies, quite

deliberately, methods of different scientiﬁc disciplines

are ingeniously combined. This was particularly well

expressed in the work done by Weisberg (2003). He

employed historical analyses to isolate the indicators

of the psychological thought processes upon which

innovations are based. Such approaches are rather rare

in giftedness research. Indeed, most talent models

do not include the analysis of cognitive processes

(with some exceptions: Gross, this volume; Kholod-

naya (1993), Shavinina and Kholodnaya (1996), Shore

and Kanevsky (1993), and Sternberg (1986)), so it

is no surprise that they were not used as explanatory

constructs. Actually, it must be nothing less than

shocking for giftedness researchers to hear that Weis-

berg was able to summarize the results of his analyses

with the simple formula “common thought processes,

uncommon products.” Heinzen and Vail (2003) arrive

at a completely analogous result when they sum-

marize that “Ordinary personalities in extraordinary

circumstances will innovate.” Such assessments are a

stern condemnation of giftedness research, resulting,

not in the least, from a lack of familiarity with their

potential explanatory contributions. The third level

of interdisciplinarity is a consequence of the domain

being investigated, which habitually crosses traditional

borders among and between ﬁelds of study. In our

modern society, innovations occur primarily in acutely

branched and highly specialized domains situated

on the interface of several scientiﬁc disciplines. It

is next to impossible to deﬁne them in terms of

common scholastic subjects or classify them into

the achievement areas given preference in giftedness

research. What particular talent does a person have at

their disposal when he/she can innovatively improve

chat dungeons? By the same token, due to the stormy

modernization of newer and newer domains with

blurred borders, it is becoming increasingly difﬁcult

to recognize the physical contours of special gifts at

an early stage, those which will lead to achievement

excellence in these new domains in the future.

(3) The third noteworthy trend in innovation re-

search results from the deﬁnition of their research ob-

jective. While giftedness research deals chieﬂy with the

generation of new ideas, products, masterpieces, etc.,

the authors of the handbook are, in addition, also ex-

plicitly concerned with the acceptance and realization

of such innovations. Nevertheless, acceptance and re-

alization take place under strong competitive pressure.

This is dramatically formulated in a quote taken from

the ﬁnal chapter by Vandervert (2003) who summarizes

“The vision and energy of innovation is all about kick-

ing some competitor’s butt!” Aside from the fact that

this orientation is, in my opinion, rather callous, I con-

sider it to be a scientiﬁc misstep to include a random

component in a deﬁnition of the investigative object of

a branch of research. And chance market niches, un-

predictable fashion currents, or quickly varying taste

predilections are deﬁnitively random. At this point I am

involuntarily reminded of the words of an unknown au-

thor: “Innovation is when the market shouts ‘Hurrah!”’

In my opinion, giftedness research would be poorly ad-

vised to assume similar orientations. Essential ﬁelds

of research such as underachievement would fall com-

pletely to the wayside – for this reason we deﬁne the

objects of our research differently.

The three trends depicted here will have, as already

pointed out, massive consequences on talent research

in the 21st century andmust lead to a paradigm change.

As the number of extraordinary achievements by teams

increases, the amount of explanatory power associated

with talent theories focusing on the individual will de-

crease. Therefore, the development of talent models

that also include groups will be a necessary conse-

quence. In addition, giftedness research will have to

increasingly seek out dialogues with social psychol-

ogists, organizational psychologists, and sociologists

and integrate their work with meta-theories such as

system theories. Giftedness research will, in my opin-

ion, increasingly have to take new domains into con-

sideration, those in which major innovations are to be

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

78 Research on Giftedness in the 21st Century 1515

expected – otherwise funding for research and pro-

motion will start to dry up in the foreseeable future.

Tightly structured academic subject boundaries and tal-

ent concepts based on scholastic success models will,

presumably, soon have to give way to much more ﬂex-

ible concepts which are more domain speciﬁc and less

trait oriented. It is up to us, as giftedness researchers,

to improve the viability of our concepts and to transfer

them into the ﬁeld of innovation research, a ﬁeld that

will be under increasing demand in the future and one

which is still ignoring us today.

The Challenge of the 21st Century

It is a steadfast fact that everything changes, noth-

ing stays the same, and structures come to pass:

Mountains erode, buildings go to ruin, machines rust,

paintings turn yellow, and organisms die. Therefore,

many of our actions are directed toward stemming

entropy. We plant foliage on precipitous slopes to

keep avalanches from forming, mend the roofs of

buildings, coat machines with layers of protective

paint to keep them from rusting, restore paintings,

and visit doctors in the case of illness. Quite topical

in the media are discussions of assorted measures

under consideration to reduce the results of the climate

change. Possible sea level increases, for instance,

entail the danger that many coastal towns or even

entire countries, like the Netherlands, must engage

in various preventative measures to insure existing

structures.

Finding solutions, and the just as important opti-

mization of defensive processes that are directed pri-

marily toward preservation, is one side of the chal-

lenge we must be in a position to face. However, we

are also aware of processes by which the order is in-

creased. New, more complex life forms come into be-

ing with novel opportunities to engage their energies

for the preservation and further evolution of structures.

However, with these evolutions we also see how the

systems that are poorest at conforming are replaced by

systems that are more effective at resisting decay. It has

been long intuitive that systems have to keep develop-

ing if they do not want to collapse. Standstill is not

possible. Indeed, the 21st century is marked by rapidly

expanding globalization and worldwide competition,

which will only increase in intensity. Products, ideas,

and scientiﬁc theories have ever shorter half-lives, i.e.,

they become obsolete faster and faster. Fifty years ago

they were about 400% longer than they are today (for

details see Shavinina, 2003). The resulting gigantic

demand for innovation can, and should, become one

of the central catalysts of giftedness research for the

third millennium. However, in my opinion, the ﬁeld

is poorly prepared to meet these challenges. Accord-

ing to current viewpoints, the key driving force behind

innovations is creative persons. Nevertheless, a brief

glance through one’s history book shows how percep-

tions which focus completely on the creativity of in-

dividuals are far too simplistic. If giftedness research

would like to make a substantial contribution to this,

our conceptions of giftedness must be revised in sev-

eral regards.

A Limited Perception of Creativity

It has long been accepted that there are limitations

on a purely individualized view of creativity and

giftedness (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Moenks &

Mason, 2000; see also the chapters on giftedness,

society, and economy by Ambrose, Reichenberg &

Landau; Shavinina; Simonton). This perspective does

not, for example, permit a realistic analysis of the

Golden Ages. How is it possible that, in the Florence

of the Medici’s, the work of unforgettable genii like

Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino,

Andrea del Verrocchio, Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo,

and Raphael could be concentrated within a time span

of 50 years? In the German language area, within a

good 100 years, several of the greatest composers of

all time were born: Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg

Friedrich H¨

andel, Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph

Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert,

Robert Schumann. However, there are also contem-

porary parallels. For instance, no less than 11 pupils

and colleagues of the Nobel Prize recipient Ernest

Rutherford were also awarded Nobel Prizes. This

impressive ﬁgure is even more astounding when

one considers that over the course of the entire 20th

century, only ﬁve women received a Nobel Prize in

the natural science disciplines of physics, chemistry,

and medicine. Nevertheless, differences between boys

and girls, or men and women concerning creativity, as

described by creativity researchers with the aid of tests

and other standardized methods, have yet to surface.

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

1516 A. Ziegler

In addition, Rutherford’s own teacher, Sir Joseph John

Thomson, was also bestowed with a Nobel Prize, as

was his son George Paget Thomson. A rather obvious

assumption would be that Sir Joseph John Thomson

was in possession of a great deal of the qualities

needed to encourage and sponsor scholars and that

Rutherford seems to have learned a great deal about

this from him.

A perspective based purely on individuals would

obviously be insufﬁcient to explain what is depicted in

the previous examples. Rutherford was, with a proba-

bility bordering on certainty, not the best creativity and

giftedness diagnostician of all time and merely gath-

ered the best available talent around him. One must,

at the very least, also take into consideration cultural

and social contexts as well as material and (research)

equipment availability. A more effective treatment of

the topics of creativity and giftedness, therefore, calls

for a modiﬁcation of our individual-based perspective.

It also necessitates consideration of another issue.

Suppose you visit a kindergarten for the gifted. You

observe a child asking one of the kindergarten teach-

ers: “Why is the Nile so long?” The answer amazes

you: “Because of the Niles length.” A minute later you

observe another child asking the same kindergarten

teacher: “Why is a wrestler so strong?” To your an-

noyance he answers “Because of his strength.” Again

one minute later you observe a third child asking this

kindergarten teacher: “Why is the tallest man of the

world so tall?” And surely, the child gets the answer

“Because of his tallness.” However, before you can

say anything to the kindergarten teacher he approaches

you beaming with joy and full of pride: “Did you

hear the children? They are always so curious. Their

questions are so creative! By the way, do you happen

to know in your capacity as a giftedness researcher

why these kids are so creative?” I have to warn my

readers. Those who are tempted to answer “Because of

their creativity” are behaving just like the kindergarten

teacher, and committing a fallacy called reiﬁcation

– the act of representing an abstraction, a theoretical

construct as a real thing.

A New Take on the Innovation Problem in

the 21st Century

Life without development – and this refers to innova-

tions of the most different kind – is not a continuous

alternative. This allegation applies on various levels:

species, actions, groups, individuals and their tools,

ideas. The concept of evolution, the replacement

of older, less-appropriate systems with new, more

appropriately conﬁgured systems, is a highly recog-

nizable characteristic of thought in the 19th century.

Darwin used it in conceptualizing the evolution of

species, Marx for the evolution of economic systems,

and Comte for the evolution of modes of thinking.

The Darwin example is particularly practical for

demonstrating that the process of ﬁnding newer,

more creative solutions is by no means an idea which

originated in the deliberations of Homo sapiens.Itis

as old as the necessity of species to be able to change

and adapt in order to insure their survival.

The foundation for the following consideration is an

idealization suggested by the philosopher Daniel Den-

nett, who introduced it while investigating the role of

language in intelligence (Dennett, 1994). I will greatly

expand on the basic framework, adapting it to make it

apply to, and work for, the issue of creativity. In ad-

dition, I will introduce an allegory which I refer to as

the Tower of Creativity (see Fig. 78.1). Its six ﬂoors are

inhabited by different types of creatures.

Floor 1: Darwinian Creatures

The bottom ﬂoor of the Tower of Creativity is occupied

by Darwinian creatures. The actions they take in their

habitats are not random. Their activities are rooted in

the information that is available to them. However,

this information is stored in their DNA. Their habitats

are subject to change, and when such changes occur,

the information they have access to may no longer be

useful. In these situations it is vital that they adapt

to the new habitat (Mayr, 2001). This necessitates

innovation.

Darwinian creatures are not able to plan innovation.

They rather rely on the more or less random processes

of gene recombination and mutation. Therefore, Dar-

winian creatures need to test an immense number of

variations before one turns out to be useful. It is often

the case that such variations lead to the demise of the

creature. The adjustment process occurs over genera-

tions, and is therefore extremely time consuming.

In actuality, the history of life on our planet is

marked by the development of innovative, creative so-

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

78 Research on Giftedness in the 21st Century 1517

Fig. 78.1 The Tower of Creativity

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

1518 A. Ziegler

lutions such as photosynthesis, the sense of smell, and

ﬂight. This process is driven by the mechanisms of

the Darwinian evolution of species, namely variation,

replication, natural selection, and mate choice. The

pressure to adapt is, however, extremely high and inno-

vations are not always feasible. In terms of time spent

roaming this planet, the average duration of a species

only comprises about 200,000 years (Miller, 2000).

One can then understand the life cycle of a species as a

constant history of innovations to improve its capacity

to adapt, to the eventual point where adaptation is no

longer possible and the species becomes extinct

Floor 2: Skinnerian Creatures

One of the most decisive and exciting events of evolu-

tion was the emergence of creatures which we, along

with Dennett, will designate Skinnerian creatures.

Skinner was the scientist who most clearly detected

the parallels between Darwinian evolution and operant

learning as well as the vast power of operant learning

processes: “Where inherited behavior leaves off, the

inherited modiﬁability of the process of conditioning

takes over” (Skinner, 1953, p. 83). The development

of a species was no longer only driven by variation

and ﬁeld testing with genes. Organisms also have

the opportunity to develop variations on actions and

can then select the most successful of the bunch. In

another context I have referred to this process as the

“survival of the ﬁttest action” (Ziegler, 2005, see also

Hull, Langman, & Glenn, 2001).

Skinnerian creatures raised the tempo of innova-

tion dramatically. Instead of several generations, inno-

vations can now arise within the life span of an indi-

vidual. However, they are reliant on the, more or less,

random production of several other action alternatives,

among which one is proven to be the most successful.

This type of creativity is evident among children who,

through trial and error, often arrive at the most surpris-

ing solutions. Several scientiﬁc discoveries can also be

seen as products of chance, having come about through

indirect action variations.

Skinnerian creatures suffer a grave disadvantage.

The process of trying things out can be dangerous. For

instance, someone using the trial and error method to

determine whether a speciﬁc plant has medicinal value

could very easily wind up with a poisonous plant. It

is interesting to note here that in some African cul-

tures, the term “gifted” is equivalent to the term used to

describe someone with the ability to heal themselves.

In order to prevent having to try things out blindly, an

ability is needed which is ﬁrst detected among the crea-

tures on the next ﬂoor up.

Floor 3: Popperian Creatures

The philosopher Karl Raimund Popper divided the

world into three areas: (1) a physical world; (2) a

world of individual perceptions and consciousnesses;

and (3) a world of human knowledge and culture,

ideas, concepts, etc. (Popper, 1959). According to

Popper, this third world has its own set of conditions

for existence as well as its own prerequisites. In a

process similar to selection, the ideas which prevail

are those which are closest to the truth. An infamous

example used by Popper here is numbers.

Popperian creatures can move freely through

this third world. Thus, they obtain the capacities to

formulate their own models of the real world and to

manipulate these models mentally (see also Johnson-

Laird, 1983). Among the prototypical representatives

of these creatures, many giftedness researchers would

include Vincent van Gogh, the incomparable and long

underestimated genius Isaac Newton, who during his

own lifetime had already taken on mythic proportions,

and the exceptional talent, still cloaked in mystery,

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. They have all been

credited with visionary work. Empowering their own

spirit in their respective ﬁelds, they were able to see,

in a certain way, things that no one else was able to

perceive and could clearly recognize things that were

unclear or hazy to others.

Creativity research has also investigated individ-

uals who did not become famous. Typical here are

studies on activities in the so-called creative ﬁelds,

for example, painting, music, or writing (see the

chapters by Geake; Kaufman, Kaufman, Beghetto &

Burghess; Kim; Root-Bernstein; Saunders Wickes

& Ward). In most cases, the investigations involved

children or young adolescents who had a wide va-

riety of capabilities (such as originality, a powerful

imagination, fantasy, courage) and were able use

these skills to mentally manipulate their realities.

Such capabilities signify a formidable advancement in

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

78 Research on Giftedness in the 21st Century 1519

human capacity. In contrast to Skinnerian creatures,

in testing out new action alternatives, the Popperian

creatures did not have to risk life and limb. They

did not even have to execute the action in question,

for instance in determining the medicinal value of

a plant. In many cases this could be accomplished

through contemplation. In a certain sense, ideas expire

when they are found to be invalid, not the persons

who had the ideas (Popper, 1959). While Skinnerian

creatures survive through luck, Popperian creatures

survive because they are – in the conventional sense –

intelligent and creative.

The opportunities opened up by mental manipula-

tions of reality are enormous. Dennett (1994) accu-

rately pointed out that each and every one of us is to-

day in the position to understand ideas that would have

been inconceivable for our grandparents. We can sur-

pass the boundaries of our imaginations and compre-

hend concepts like subatomic particles and black holes.

We, like Albert Einstein, are able to envision riding on

a beam of light through the universe and, on the basis

of this visionary power, can unravel the most difﬁcult

of problems. The fantastic opportunities that Popperian

creatures can take advantage of through their access to

the third world are very likely the reason why many

giftedness researchers investigate creativity almost ex-

clusively with these creatures. However, they would

only have climbed halfway up the Tower of Creativity.

Floor 4: Spencerian Creatures

In going up another ﬂight, one runs into the Spence-

rian creatures. In a certain sense, they draw their intel-

ligence and creativity from the societies and cultures

in which they subsist. They owe their name to the En-

glish philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer. He

made the ideas of evolution and adaptation productive

for the analysis of the development of social groups.

He (and not Darwin!) coined the term the “survival of

the ﬁttest.” This expression is actually somewhat de-

ceptive, as it seems to imply that only one society – the

ﬁttest – will survive. In fact, Spencer was of the opinion

that at a particular point in time several different types

of societies can exist, and that all could have adapted

(Barker, 1997).

The belief that entire societies can be creative, or

have the potential to become creative, has already been

broached above in reference to the Golden Ages. I

would like to elaborate this idea further with the help

of an arresting study by Qin and Simon (1990). The

objective here was to replicate a celebrated scientiﬁc

discovery. The eminent 17th century mathematician

Johannes Kepler had access, as did his fellow as-

tronomers, to a set of data which deﬁned the distance

of each planet in the solar system to the sun as well

as their solar periods or the time they needed to

complete one rotational orbit around the sun. First

he discovered, for the ﬁve planets closest to the sun,

that the periods increased with the squares of the

distances. However, he was never really satisﬁed with

his publication of this ﬁnding, since the ﬁt was not

good. For 10 long years he was not able to come up

with a better solution, until he ﬁnally realized that the

square of the orbital periods are proportional to the

cube of their distances from the sun. This law is valid

to this day, and is known to us as Kepler’s third law.

If there had been a Nobel Prize at that time, Kepler

most certainly would have received it. Qin and Simon

provided college sophomores with the data set used by

Kepler. These sophomores were, up to this point, not

known to possess any special talents. However, some

of the students were actually capable of recognizing,

in less than an hour, the mathematical relationships in

this data set for which Kepler had needed 10 years to

verify.

Why were these otherwise rather unexceptional stu-

dents capable of quickly realizing creative achieve-

ments for which a recognized genius like Kepler had

needed 10 years? And would Kepler also need 10 years

to make this discovery if he were working today, or

would this be a much quicker process for him too?

The answers here are, of course, highly speculative.

But it is plausible to assume that Kepler, in the 21st

century, would be capable of making his discoveries

much faster. In the ﬁrst place, at that point in time, his

basic mathematical knowledge was equivalent to that

amassed by a good student by the end of the 11th grade

today. This knowledge is sufﬁcient to make this discov-

ery and is now much more familiar to students. There is

another even more signiﬁcant point. The belief that the

physical world could be explained mathematically was

only ﬁrst instituted during the 17th century, and this

is one of the central convictions of modern scientiﬁc

conceptions of the world (Cohen, 1994; Kuhn, 1970).

Academics like Kepler and Galileo were the ﬁrst to ac-

tively experiment with this approach in the quest for

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

1520 A. Ziegler

knowledge. The students participating in the investiga-

tion with Qin and Simon (1990) can therefore be un-

derstood as Spencerian creatures who, in the course

of their individual socialization, adapted themselves

to a scientiﬁc/epistemic world, which has command

over methodological and mathematical abilities that

are completely different from those which were ac-

cepted by the world in the 17th century. This mathe-

matical and methodological background, made avail-

able through their social community, enables them to

make discoveries for which – in this example – Pop-

perian creatures Kepler and the best of his contempo-

rary astronomers, despite possibly superior individual

learning capacities, would only be capable of making

after an extremely long period of time, if at all.

We should be able to agree on the fact that all per-

sons have the capacities to understand several types

of ideas and appreciate artistic developments which

were inconceivable by the geniuses in our grandpar-

ents’ generation. Just like the students in the investiga-

tion by Qin and Simon (1990), we are nowadays all ca-

pable of discoveries which persons living in previous

centuries would have been generally considered bril-

liant. It would be presumptuous to accord these dis-

coveries to ourselves.

As scientists, today more than ever, we are much

more akin to Spencerian creatures in yet another sense.

Brief glances through the tables of contents in the best

scientiﬁc journals prove that publications are mostly

the result of teamwork. Also, Nobel Prizes are often

bestowed for cooperative achievements – achieve-

ments which could only have been accomplished

jointly. Spencerian creatures are, from this perspective,

extremely social. They are able to realize that several

innovations, creative achievements, etc., can no longer

be produced by individuals alone, rather only though

the collective accomplishments of several individuals.

Floor 5: Gregorian Creatures

If we ascend yet another ﬂoor in the Tower of Cre-

ativity, we ﬁnd Gregorian creatures. Their creative

prospects are much more far reaching than those of the

Spencerian creatures. They were named after Richard

Gregory, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at

the University of Bristol. In his work he systematically

pursued an idea, one which anthropologists have long

recognized in a rather indirect form: By introducing

tools we greatly expand both our intelligence and our

creative potential. The telescope enabled Galileo to

assess the Copernican geocentric system. With the

help of radio telescopes, Penzias and Wilson were

able to peer into the deep recesses of the universe,

all the way back to its origins, and were able to

discover cosmic microwave background radiation. The

discoveries made by Leeuwenhoek, who invented the

microscope, characterized the so-called century of the

Animalcula, the world of the miniscule. Among the

sensations of the era were the discoveries of red blood

corpuscles in 1668 and microorganisms in 1675.

Leeuwenhoek’s invention is also a ﬁtting example

of how Gregorian creatures are capable of surmounting

the chromosomal limitations under which Darwinian

creatures collapse. It is astounding that H. sapiens were

able to exist for more than 100,000 years without being

aware of the presence of microorganisms, which com-

pose no less than 60% of the entire biological mass

on our planet and encompass a diversity of species

amounting to ca. 3,000,000,000 varieties. This is sev-

eral times the number of species visible to us. In terms

of our own bodies, this comes to ca. 10 microorganisms

for each cell. Only in the guise of a Gregorian creature

were H. sapiens able to discover this.

In the same way technical equipment was able to

augment the creative capabilities of scientists, auxil-

iary resources can encourage advances in achievement

in all ﬁelds of human activity. The tennis/table tennis

players who were at the top of the game in the mid-

dle of the last century would not stand a chance against

modern players, since contemporary racquets/paddles

allow players to make hit balls in ways that were un-

thinkable with the materials used in earlier equipment.

Further examples from the ﬁeld of sports include the

introduction of tartan lanes in short distance sprinting

competitions and the use of sophisticated water com-

positions in swimming competitions. Both of these ac-

complishments triggered a ﬂood of world records in

their respective disciplines. A wide variety of exam-

ples can be found in the arts as well. The introduction

of electronic instruments enriched the acoustic spec-

trum of music. The year 1856 was a milestone in the

history of painting. Henry William Perkins discovered,

at the age of 18 years, the ﬁrst aniline dye (aniline

purple, known as mauve or mauveine). Its primary ap-

plication was as a textile colorant. The ﬁrst synthetic

pigments launched a true revolution in the ﬁeld of

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

78 Research on Giftedness in the 21st Century 1521

painting, which drastically enhanced the opportunities

artists had to work with color for decades to come,

and enabled the establishment of modern painting as

we know it today (Garﬁeld, 2000). However, not only

were new pigments discovered, but the properties of

paint were also revolutionized. Who has not heard

about the infamous artistic rivalry between Leonardo

da Vinci and Michelangelo? Leonardo was commis-

sioned to eternalize the victorious battle of Anghiari on

the wall of a meeting chamber in Florence’s city hall.

He experimented with a special type of ﬁnishing for

this work of art. However, through this rather ineffec-

tual drying method, using burning coals, the artwork

was destroyed. To a minor degree, the effort was actu-

ally successful, but the heat was only effective for the

bottom half of the chamber, and the paint used for the

upper half of the mural melted away. Were this rivalry

between Leonardo and Michelangelo to take place to-

day, questions concerning the durability of the paint

would play, at most, a subordinate role, and the out-

come of this competition in creativity would be decided

on the basis of entirely different qualities.

Popperian creatures, who have been favored in cre-

ativity research, only have the prospect of using mental

manipulation to incite their internal mental worlds to

reach new levels of expertise. Gregorian creatures blast

past these barriers. They design portions of their exter-

nal environment in order to substantially broaden the

scope of their creativity.

Floor 6: Blue Brain Creatures

As impressive as the creative capabilities of Grego-

rian creatures may be, they are easily eclipsed by the,

historically speaking, youngest creatures, those which

occupy the uppermost ﬂoor of the Tower of Creativ-

ity. Blue Brain creatures are no longer singular indi-

viduals, they rather exist in the form of cognitive net-

works, teams that utilize tools. Their name is derived

from Blue Brain, a project inaugurated in May 2005. It

is a collaboration between IBM and Henry Markram’s

Brain and Mind Institute at the ´

Ecole Polytechnique in

Lausanne, Switzerland. The goal of the project is the

ﬁrst computer simulation of the entire human brain.

Projects like Blue Brain can no longer be conducted

by a single creative person; this means that Popperian

creatures are doomed to fail at such projects. In or-

der to bring them to completion one needs (1) several

scientists, engineers, programmers, etc. This aspect is

very familiar to us through Spencerian creatures: Cer-

tain discoveries cannot be made by individuals, and

rather necessitate cooperation among several individ-

uals, in some cases calling for large, international re-

search teams. But this is not all. (2) In addition to

the activities of the research team, IBM supplied the

project with immense stores of computer capacities.

However, the utilization of tools was already recog-

nized among Gregorian creatures. What is then so new

about Blue Brain creatures? (3) Blue Brain has had two

deﬁcits from the start. In the ﬁrst place, the simulation

of the brain requires capacities to calculation which no

computer in the world was capable of. In the second

place, they need theoretical knowledge from the ﬁeld

of neurobiology, which is not yet available. Blue Brain

is therefore a project, which requires its staff and its

tools to be evolving beings. Research centers, which

educate their own scientiﬁc offspring with speciﬁc tal-

ents and speciﬁcally develop research instruments to

insure the evolution of the ﬁeld itself, are perfect exam-

ples of Blue Brain creatures. They are entities which, as

a team, have realized their own need for learning and

the need to continually develop the tools at their dis-

posal and actively pursue these goals in addition to de-

veloping the actual innovations they are charged with.

A deﬁning characteristic is that they have, as a solid

goal, the evolution of themselves and their tools in or-

der to attain their creative objectives.

Of What Service Is the Allegory of the

Tower of Creativity?

The beneﬁt offered by the allegory of the Tower of Cre-

ativity is that it facilitates more sophisticated and, pre-

sumably, better responses to the central challenges fac-

ing giftedness research in the 21st century. In a rapidly

and ever changing world, with quickly developing mar-

kets and an immense pressure for innovation, routine

solutions are no longer adequate. There is a restriction

on the number of new solutions Popperian creatures are

capable of coming up with, which also concur with the

paradigmatic normal case of giftedness research (cf.

Heller, M¨

onks, Sternberg, & Subotnik, 2000). In this

light, their potential contribution to meeting the central

challenges of the 21st century seems to be essentially

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

1522 A. Ziegler

limited. In order to remain sustainable in the future,

giftedness research has to expand its own perspectives.

The allegory of the Tower of Creativity suggests

that, in the future, giftedness research will be assessed

by how well it can conceive of Spencerian creatures,

Gregorian creatures, and above all Blue Brain creatures

as the architects of innovations. Practically speaking, it

will be assessed on whether or not it can provide effec-

tive programs to promote these creatures. Otherwise,

and in all probability, expertise and innovation research

will overtake it.

Conclusions

Giftedness research will remain in demand in the fore-

seeable future and, according to the opinions of sev-

eral of the authors contributing to this handbook, this

demand will even increase in intensity. I share this op-

timism. The fact that this exceptional book, with con-

tributions from researchers from all parts of the world,

can be published is a clear expression of justiﬁcation

for such optimism.

Without a doubt, in many countries a great deal of

hope will be placed on giftedness research and applied

giftedness research to afford them opportunities to in-

sure advances in prosperity, cultural enrichment, and

sustainability. However, as giftedness researchers, we

must also pose the question of how long this trend can

be maintained and what we ourselves can, or in better

terms, must be doing to extend it, perhaps even how to

bolster it. In drawing a summary of this contribution,

I would like to refer to three points which we should

essentially be keeping in mind.

We have to be capable of self-criticism. Research

is a never ending process that is constantly produc-

ing preliminary results. It is massively dependent on a

permanent willingness to continue intentionally evolv-

ing its own methods and models. Two developments

characterize the maturity of a branch of science. The

ﬁrst is that it is cognizant of its own transformation,

in other words, its history. This has been established

in giftedness research for several decades. An entire

chapter of this book has been dedicated to this history,

and several other chapters also take it into consider-

ation. The second discernible milestone is whether a

branch of science is open to a meta-theoretical perspec-

tive. This does not only offer, as in historical considera-

tions, the opportunity to make temporal comparisons of

research ﬁndings, a meta-theoretical perspective also

offers opportunities for theoretical and methodological

optimization. Quality standards can be discussed, in-

troduced, and made compulsory. For example, Ziegler

and Heller (2000) developed a list of quality standards

to be applied to scientiﬁc deﬁnitions of giftedness.

These were, for example, applied by the editors of the

book Conceptions of Giftedness: Socio-cultural Per-

spectives (Phillipson & McCann, 2007) to insure the

quality of the manuscripts submitted for publication. In

this book, Phillipson and Dai each composed highly in-

teresting chapters from meta-theoretical perspectives.

To sum up, these two trends of competent, yet criti-

cal, self-inspection and meta-theoretical self-reﬂection

should be established more deeply in the ﬁeld.

A vigorous giftedness research must be prepared to

actively seek out discourses with its parent disciplines

such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc., in-

stead of just applying their concepts. It must be able to

reciprocally supply them with novel research questions

and a more proliﬁc exchange must be realized. In my

opinion, this calls for much more adept proﬁling in the

ﬁeld of giftedness research. It should keep its eye on

the intrinsic objective of this branch of research: suc-

cessful processes (learning, education, achievement,

etc.). In this way it can become a drosophila to its par-

ent disciplines.

In conclusion, giftedness research will have to re-

sist its, with certainty, ever-strengthening rivals’ ex-

pertise research and innovation research. Let us as-

sume that the following scenario were to develop: Ex-

pertise researchers prove to be able to prognosticate

Nobel Prize winners before giftedness researchers are

able to and then, 1 year later, someone is awarded a

Nobel Prize who was educated according to recom-

mendations made by innovation research. In contrast

those who were educated according to recommenda-

tions made by giftedness research went home empty-

handed. It is easy to see where future research funds

will be ﬂowing. In order to prevent this from happen-

ing, giftedness research must be able to evolve. It is

much too closely bound to the conceptions of achieve-

ment excellence and innovation I have attributed to

Popperian creatures. It should also focus on Spencerian

creatures, Gregorian creatures, and Blue Brain crea-

tures. This handbook is hard proof that opportunities

for evolution in the ﬁeld do exist. Should giftedness re-

search be able to accomplish this, it will have tremen-

Book Shavinina 9781402061615 Proof2 December 2, 2008

78 Research on Giftedness in the 21st Century 1523

dous chances of advancing to one of the most important

research disciplines of the 21st century.

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The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) was established at Johns Hopkins University in 1971 by Professor Julian Stanley to help youths who reason extremely well mathematically find the educational resources they need to achieve their full potential (Benbow & Stanley, 1983; Keating, 1976; Stanley, 1977; Stanley, Keating, & Fox, 1974). After administering above-grade-level tests to identify students with advanced mathematical reasoning abilities, SMPY provided counseling and created programs to meet their academic needs. Eventually, university-based talent centers were established around the country to continue the practices SMPY pioneered. Because SMPY’s methods for developing talent evolved over time in a very pragmatic way, that is, in response to the needs of individual students, the psychological and conceptual bases for this approach have not been especially emphasized in the literature. In the first edition of this book, for example, Stanley and Benbow (1986) suggested that SMPY was “not concerned much with conceptualizing giftedness” and had “not spent much time contemplating the psychological underpinnings of giftedness” (p. 361). However, Duke University psychologist Michael Wallach, in a review of one of SMPY’s early books (Stanley, George, & Solano, 1977), observed that: What is particularly striking here is how little that is distinctly psychological seems involved in SMPY, and yet how very fruitful SMPY appears to be. It is as if trying to be psychological throws us off the course and into a mire of abstract dispositions that help little in facilitating students'demonstrable talents.

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R. Cooper

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