Academic Talent Research Articles

Estilos de Pensamiento Matemático de Estudiantes con Talento Académico

This study explores the predominant mathematical thinking style that students with academic talent used in solving mathematical problems. Thinking styles are preferences by subjects in the way of expressing mathematical skills against a task, in this case, visual, formal and integrated. We assessed 99 students from an academic support talent program, in a retrospective ex post facto study with only one group. We administered the questionnaire mathematical thinking styles of Borromeo-Ferri and determined that these students exhibited mostly an integrated style of thinking, which involves the use of symbols and verbal representations with visual expressions in solving mathematical exercises. They also show a strong orientation to address the problems of combined mode, which involves considering them as a whole at a time.

中国特色学术人才跨界流动的实现机制研究

中国特色学术人才跨界流动的实现机制研究

Human resources in the global higher education market: the presence of foreign professors in Spanish universities

Despite the existence of a global higher education market in which universities compete to attract talented academics from all over the world, most higher education institutions hire very few foreign researchers. Indeed, in Spain, only 1 in 40 academics are from abroad. This article focuses the Spanish case in order to deepen our understanding of the factors affecting the internationalisation of academic staff in the higher education sector. The analysis is based on data from the European Register of Tertiary Education Institutions and Spanish Higher Education Statistics data, collected by Spain’s National Statistics Office. The main results of this exploratory analysis show that there are differences between Spanish regions in terms of the proportion of foreign staff they hire. Moreover, at the institutional level, the most internationalised universities are relatively new institutions, and most of them are located in Catalonia. The political and economic framework in Spain discourages the hiring of international academics. However, in this context, two important insights should be highlighted: On the one hand, the differences between Catalonia and the rest of the Spanish autonomous communities show that sub‑national policies may have a strong impact on internationalisation processes in decentralised countries like Spain; on the other hand, divergence between universities shows the importance of the strategic behaviour of actors facing environmental pressures.

Organizational Socialization and Job Satisfaction of Faculty at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan

Like other institutions with world-class aspirations, Nazarbayev University, an emerging research university in Kazakhstan, relies heavily on international faculty. As this rapidly growing institution builds its legitimacy, it has to attract, socialize, and retain the best academic talent from around the world. Using a survey design, this study examines the largely understudied phenomena of organizational socialization and job satisfaction of international faculty using the case of Nazarbayev University.

Chinese Returnees from Overseas Study: An Understanding of Brain Gain and Brain Circulation in the Age of Globalization

Among discussions on international academic mobility, a persistent challenge is to understand whether education abroad can become a source of brain gain, and whether globalization can offer source countries the hope that they might enjoy the benefits of freer cross-border flows in information and personnel. With reference to China, this article provides an understanding of these two issues. It reveals practical factors affecting returnees’ decision to return, their contribution to specific areas, and obstacles that limit their contribution and career opportunities. In addition, it sheds light on an emerging brain circulation between China and foreign countries, along with the increased cross-border flow of academic talent from and into China.

The Occupational Socialization of Athletic Administrators: A Content Analysis of Graduate Program Websites

Employing occupational socialization as an interpretive framework, this study drew on a content analysis of athletic administration graduate program websites to explore the relationship between the programs and key issues facing professionals in the field of intercollegiate athletics. Results revealed that the processes and mechanisms in place to prepare graduate students for careers in intercollegiate athletics appear to be adequate, but could more comprehensively address the increasingly complex business enterprise of college sports, NCAA policies and rules, and key strategies to develop the academic talents of athletes. Formal processes, such as courses and experiential learning activities (e.g., internships, practica, field research) in the studied graduate programs, appeared to dominate role learning; informal processes or unintentional learning, such as interactions with peers and other campus stakeholders, appeared to be absent. This study highlights new directions for future work aimed at understanding the professional preparation of athletic administrators.

George Alberti: A Myriad of Contributions to Diabetes and Beyond.

K. George M.M. Alberti Medawar and Pyke, in Hitler’s Gift (1), record the movement out of Germany in the 1930s of world-class academic talent from within the Jewish diaspora. But among the Jewish migrants was one too young yet to show such talent, indeed a mere toddler, escaping with mother and brother as the door closed in 1939. Kurt George Matthew Mayer Alberti was born in September of 1937. His father William Peter (after the family’s names were duly anglicized) was a printer, and his mother Edith Elizabeth was a research physicist before marriage. Mayer-Alberti-Strasse can still in found in Koblenz, but the young George Alberti settled with his family in Gateshead, U.K.; U.K. citizenship was granted to all in November 1946. The northeast of England was clearly a hit with the young Alberti—he returned later in life from the south of England to be professor of Clinical Biochemistry and subsequently professor of Medicine in Newcastle (see below). But as a lad he crossed the River Tyne to Newcastle’s Royal Grammar School, an institution with a strong record for forwarding its pupils to England’s top universities; George went on to Balliol College Oxford. Balliol is perhaps better known as a cradle of high-flying politicians and civil servants, and this may have confirmed George Alberti’s (partly correct) view of his own personality as “laid back, iconoclastic, irreverent” in an interview for The BMJ in 2016 (2). More Cambridge than Oxford in fact. Young George. Left: George and older brother (Peter) with grandparents (Willi and Hedwig Lachmann) in Koblenz, Germany, prior to the family’s move to England. Middle: George as a schoolboy, circa 1947. Right: George and his mother, Edith, circa 1962 Medical students at Oxford usually studied Animal Physiology as an intercalated Bachelor of Arts degree, and it was not unusual …

Offering prescriptions of leader– member exchanges towards developing academic talent in higher education

ABSTRACTThis paper examines leader–member exchange behaviour for the development of academic talent in higher education. Drawing from a sample of academic leaders at a large South African university, interviews conducted with the chairs of departments (CoDs) provide new insight on development practices and actions for follower development within a leader– member exchange relationship. The study reveals significant differences in the behaviours of CoDs with low LMX scores and those with high LMX scores in the task of developing academic staff. Suggestions for enhancing academic follower development within this relationship are also offered. This study provides academic leaders with a comprehensive and constructive perspective for developing academic talent in higher education.

Intellectual Genocide in the making?: The Strong and Pervasive Evidence of Ethnic Inequalities in Ethiopia

Ethnic inequalities in all sectors of life in Ethiopia have increasingly become serious and pervasive. Access to higher education (including scholarship grants) and most sought after disciplines appear to be disproportionally distributed along the multitude of ethnic groups in the country. In this paper I argue that intellectual genocide is in the making in three different forms: (1) systematic discrimination against certain groups with regard to educational opportunities, higher education, and scholarship grants; (2) brain drain — the movement of intellectuals and young skilled Ethiopians that has increased under the Tigrean People’s Liberation Fronts (TPLF) regime. Some observers say that Ethiopia has become a substantial net exporter of academic talent, a so-called brain drain; (3) cultural genocide, the action of the system which has the aim or effect of dispossessing the people of their lands, territories or resources, cultural values, language, and historical/religious relics and heritages. The philosophical foundation/methodology that undergirds this study is critical theory with elements of poststructuralism and post colonialism. The strategies used to collate and collect data is meta-analysis (data synthesis), some form of discourse analysis, personal accounts, and a limited amount of sociological introspection. There are a number of reasons or mechanisms that lead from ethnicity to violence. My evidence shows that there are already some patterns and discourses that might precipitate or crystallize the mechanisms in Ethiopia. The study shows that it is high time to stop the madness and redress the chronic and pervasive disparities within and between groups. It is an imperative that we focus on our similarities and common destiny. “The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.” It is about Ethiopian people. It is just unacceptable to seek self-aggrandizement for ourselves—or for our specific ethnic group, and increase power and influence to draw attention to own importance—and forget about progress and prosperity for the multitudes of ethnic groups in Ethiopia. Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.

Consideration and Practices in Academic Talents Oriented Research Type Teaching in <<Electromagnetics Theory>>

With the popularization of higher education, colleges and universities in China carry the responsibility of bringing up diverse type of talents. A teaching practice aiming at educating academic talents is introduced in this paper. This teaching practice targets at delivering knowledge as well as training the students’ abilities. Based on this target, the consideration in selecting the teaching contents, and practices in the research type teaching are reported. Examples of learning outcome from students are presented, and the challenges and corresponding treatment are discussed.

Theoretical Approaches, Societal Issues, and Practical Implications for School-Based and Extracurricular Talent Development: Outcomes of the Inaugural European–North American Summit on Talent Development (Part I)

Gifted Child Quarterly and High Ability Studies collaborated on this pair of special issues resulting from the Inaugural European–North American Summit on Talent Development. The summit, held in Washington, D.C., in April 2016, had two main goals. The summit aimed, first, to increase researchers’ awareness of work on talent development being carried out in different countries by bringing together scholars working in Europe and the United States. The summit’s second aim was to initiate a new format for small, collaborative conferences at which participants present ideas they are working on—in medias res, so to speak—to all the other participants in order to receive feedback before they have completed their research. The event was made possible through the generous financial support of the American Psychological Association, the Belin-Blank Center at the University of Iowa, the Center for Talent Development of Northwestern University, and the Academic Talent Development Program at the University of California, Berkeley. The 2-day event consisted of clusters of presentations on eight topics. In each cluster, three researchers (two from American institutions and one from a European institution) presented their work and discussed future directions and possible implementations. Thanks to editors Betsy McCoach, Del Siegle, and Albert Ziegler, all participants were invited to submit articles for publication based on their presentation. The resulting articles on work presented in the first four talent development clusters (theoretical perspectives, societal participation, the context of school, and outside of school) make up the special issue of Gifted Child Quarterly. Articles arising from presentations in the final four talent development clusters (outcomes, psychosocial factors, adaptive and maladaptive learning, and high achievement and performance) comprise the special issue of High Ability Studies.

Artificial Immune Clonal Selection Based Algorithm in Academic Talent Selection

Artificial immune clonal selection based algorithms are centered on prominent immunological theory as computation mechanisms that emulate processes in biological immune system. Due to their abilities in achieving higher probability for global optimization, this technique has been used in many fields such as machine learning, computer security, pattern recognition, scheduling and etc. This article attempts to study the potential of clonal selection based algorithms for talent selection in higher learning institution. This study consists of three phases; data preparation for pre-processing academic talent data-sets; model construction using four selected artificial immune clonal selection based algorithms; and model analysis to measure the accuracy of the model proposed by the algorithms based on 10-fold cross validation. There were several experiments carried out using different set of training and testing data-sets; the significance test was also conducted in order to support the findings. As a result, Clonal Selection Classifier (CSCA) and CLONal Selection ALGorithm (CLONALG) algorithms proposed slightly high accuracy and would be considered as the potential classifiers for talent selection. For future work, the proposed model can be strengthened by the comparative study with other heuristic based searching algorithms in evolutionary computation paradigms such as genetic algorithm, ant colony optimization, swam algorithms and etc.

Urban attraction policies for international academic talent: Munich and Vienna in comparison

This paper compares attraction policies for academic talent of two highly developed Central European metropolitan cities. We develop a heuristic framework in order to analyse political actions that aim at attracting international academic talents. It is shown that the two examined cities differ substantially in this respect despite their similarities in economic structure and framework conditions. While Vienna has set a number of policy actions to attract foreign researchers, Munich faces constraints because of its subordinate position within the federal system. Nevertheless, the superordinate federal state of Bavaria engages in a number of active policies to attract foreign students which also benefit the city of Munich. Despite their popularity in policy circles, attraction policies may result in adverse welfare outcomes for some segments of the urban society.

Noel Jack de Jersey (1923–2016)

![][1] One of Australia’s three pioneering palynologists, Noel Jack de Jersey passed away in his 93rd year on 26 March 2016 at his home at Cedar Grove, about 40 km south of Brisbane in Queensland. The other two pioneers are Isabel C. Cookson (1893–1973) and Basil E. Balme (1923–). Noel de Jersey was a quiet, life-long high achiever, delving initially into seismology, coal petrology and palaeobotany, and subsequently into taxonomic and biostratigraphical palynology, his career of choice. He was a Foundation Member of the Geological Society of Australia and, in his spare time, a keen golfer and traveller. Noel was born on 25 February 1923, and lived for five years at coastal Tweed Heads in northernmost New South Wales. His father was Headmaster of the Coolangatta State Primary School in southeastern Queensland, just across the Queensland–New South Wales State border, where Noel began his early primary schooling. This he completed in 1935 at Goombungee State School, northwest of Toowoomba and west-northwest of Brisbane, following his father’s transfer there as headmaster. He attended the Church of England Grammar School in Brisbane from 1936 to 1939 and, in his final year at 16 years of age, Noel was academically the highest ranking student in the school. This led, in 1940, to Noel winning one of the 20 available open scholarships to the University of Queensland (UQ). Professor Henry Casselli Richards, the inaugural professor of geology and Dean of the Faculty of Science at UQ, persuaded him into studying geology, which was not Noel’s original intention. Professor Richards, in recognising Noel’s academic talents, took him under his wing and encouraged him to take on an additional subject beyond the required four that he was already enrolled in. That extra subject was geology and, until then, Noel had considered chemistry to be his career … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

Role of Department Heads in Academic Development

This article examines the role of leadership in the development of academic talent in higher education from a social exchange and organizational support perspective. Drawing from a sample of academic staff at a large South African university, the study investigates the extent to which a quality leader–member exchange relationship versus a formal organizational resource perspective contributes to academic staff perceptions of organizational investment in academic talent development. The study found new evidence of the ways in which relationship resources embodied in the leader–member exchange relationship between supervisors (leaders) and employees (followers) influence employees’ perceptions of investment in their development. The results also demonstrated how the leader–member exchange theory, combined with theoretical work on organizational development support, could help to explain the critical role of department heads as leaders in developing academic staff (as followers).

The Demography of Scholarly Reading

This paper argues that the demographic consequences of the ending of U. S. academic expansion in the 1970s virtually guaranteed a large decline in the total disciplinary effort available to read any given unit of sociological publication. These effects are partly composition effects related to shift from a pyramidal to a columnar age distribution and partly substitution effects related to the switch from a seller’s to a buyer’s market for academic talent. As buyers raised standards, publication expanded rapidly, which both increased the material to be read and decreased the time available to read it. The crisis in scholarly reading is less a result of changes in individual scholarly propensities to read than in the numbers and ages of scholars and of the newly central role of publication in scholarly careers. Since publication is now a system of excess, the paper closes with an analysis of the various strategies available to handle that excess.

Cognitive Characteristics of Gifted and Not Gifted Fifth-grade Chilean Students from Economically Vulnerable Contexts

The purpose of the study was to reveal the cognitive characteristics of talented children who come from economically vulnerable contexts in Chile. Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) was administered to a sample of 5160 students who took part in the process of identification of gifted students from the program PENTA UC in Chile between 2001 and 2010, when the participants were in the fifth grade. Results showed that there is a possible ceiling effect in SPM and thus Advanced Progressive Matrices might be more appropriate in the future identification process. Gifted Chilean students from public schools differ from not gifted students in both perceptual and analytical abilities, even at the early age of 10-11 years. Important gender differences emerged in solving the most difficult items of the test, more precisely in the rules applied in their solution. Gifted boys showed an advantage in addition/subtraction or distribution of two rules, whereas gifted girls did better in distribution of three rules. Results from this study could contribute not only to the process of identification of gifted students, but also to the proposition of adequate educational policy, corresponding to the cognitive characteristics of the children with academic talent.

Ivy League Bound: A Case Study of a Brilliant African American Male Mathematics Major

The educational outcomes of African American male students have been examined by several researchers, and there is a growing body of research reporting on African American male students’ academic talents and gifts. This qualitative case study examines the racial and academic experiences of Malik, an African American male mathematics major. His case is reported and analyzed across three developmental stages: 1) early childhood and adolescence, 2) secondary schooling years, and 3) college years. In this article, critical race theory (CRT) is used to document and analyze his experiences. Finally, implications for research and practice are shared to advance research in this area and promote the brilliance of African American male students.

Effective factors for recruitment and retention in Malaysian private universities

The number of private universities has grown rapidly and is considered to be a key component of the Malaysian Higher Educational System, and, accordingly, the recruitment and retention of academic staff has taken on unprecedented importance. This study was designed to examine the recruitment and retention of academic staff at six private universities. The total number of academic staff in the selected universities was found to be 1986 of which 455 participated in this study for the purpose of data analysis. The statistical results suggest there should be a greater focus on the strategies and policies of recruitment and retention of academic staff to overcome the challenges these institutions are facing. This study contributes to the related literature, makes a practical contribution to private universities' leadership strategies and informs and comments on policies which will enable academic talent to succeed.

Developing equitable selection criteria for talent development programmes in inequitable contexts

This article explores the challenges of designing equitable selection criteria for a pre-university 'talent development' programme for high school learners from disadvantaged communities. It is argued that by giving due consideration to personal and environmental factors, it becomes possible to more reliably assess academic talent in inequitable contexts. The authors suggest that the experiences of the Go to University to Succeed (GUTS) programme in selecting learners could be transferred to other countries which, like South Africa, grapple with large inequities in socio-economic status and quality of education.