Abstract
Fully developing the talents of all students is a fundamental goal for personal well-being and development and ultimately for global societal innovation and flourishing. However, in this paper we focus on what we believe is an often neglected and underdeveloped population, that of the gifted. We draw from the cognitive aptitude and gifted education research literatures to make the case that solutions to consequential real-world problems can be greatly enhanced by more fully developing the talents of the intellectually gifted population, which we operationalize in this paper as roughly the top 5% of cognitive talent. Should well-supported high achievers choose to solve them, these problems span health, science, economic growth, and areas unforeseen. We draw from longitudinal research on intellectually precocious students and retrospective research on leaders and innovators in society, showing that mathematical, verbal, and spatial aptitudes are linked to societal innovation. We then discuss two remaining fundamental challenges: the identification of disadvantaged and marginalized groups of students who have traditionally been neglected in selection for gifted programming suited to their current developmental needs, and the building of skills beyond academic ones, specifically in the related areas of open-minded thinking and intellectual humility.
Highlights
We begin our article describing how developed cognitive aptitudes are important to solving real-world problems, introduce our theoretical and empirical perspective that frames the remainder of the article, and discuss issues in regard to the support and development of gifted students, and really all students, on multiple dimensions
Other scholars argue that the long-run economic impact of this loss is the same as onethird of a year of schooling which translates to a gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 1.5% on average for the remainder of the century (Hanushek and Woessmann 2020; Schleicher 2020)
Improving the talent development of the top 5 percent of gifted students globally will improve the likelihood of solving multiple consequential real-world problems in the future that can promote the common good and enhance our standard of living
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. When many children come from poverty, they will fail to be recognized as gifted, they might not even develop to be gifted (e.g., Hair et al 2015) This is true for countries around the world where lack of opportunities and numerous headwinds (Stevens 2020; Wai and Worrell 2020) face talented but disadvantaged students (in particular compared to their advantaged counterparts). Our hope is that at least for some, choices to fulfill one’s potential might be consonant with an interest in contributing to the broader improvement of society, and it is in that hope that we write this article This special issue call for papers asked contributors to take one consequential realworld problem and discuss what we know about cognitive abilities that could help us to solve the problem. We begin our article describing how developed cognitive aptitudes are important to solving real-world problems, introduce our theoretical and empirical perspective that frames the remainder of the article, and discuss issues in regard to the support and development of gifted students, and really all students, on multiple dimensions
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