Multidisciplinary perspectives and field strengthening questions for gifted education research

ABSTRACT

Considers multidisciplinary perspectives as a lens through which to view gifted education research. In the spirit of scholars who have also sought to ask field strengthening questions to help improve scientific advance, we address four questions and encourage other scholars from all disciplines to ask their own questions: 1. What if the field is much larger than we think it is? 2. What if the field is less intellectually diverse than we think it is? 3. What if the evidence supporting the efficacy of gifted programming is not as strong as we think it is? and 4. What if gifted learners may actually be okay even if they are not fully challenged? After reviewing evidence supporting (and failing to support) the core idea behind each of these questions (with a U. S. focus and for academically-gifted students in more academic domains) we conclude with ideas about continuing to ask field strengthening questions to improve research. We should explore questions and ideas and established findings from disciplines outside gifted and try to make gifted a more multidisciplinary field by being open to learning from other ways of approaching knowledge through a plurality of methods and disciplinary perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Multidisciplinary approach
• conceptual foundations
• population representative samples
• communication

Disclosure statement

The research reported here was in part supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through grant R305A210428 to Jonathan Wai at the University of Arkansas. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education, London, UK.

Notes

1. The developed cognitive aptitudes a student brings to a specific situation at a given time are important to learning in school, but these aptitudes are also important products of schooling (Lohman, 1993, 2005; Ritchie & Tucker-Drob, 2018; Snow, 1996). In this paper we start from the well-established structure of cognitive abilities (Carroll, 1993) and specifically the Radex configuration (Lubinski, 2004) which draws from general reasoning along with the specific aptitudes of mathematical, verbal, and spatial. Schmidt (2017, p. 32) noted the importance of “omitted relevant research in the credibility of research” and argued that the “failure to acknowledge well-established findings on specific abilities” in addition to general reasoning was one of the largest omitted aspects across all of the social sciences. This is also an omitted aspect in gifted education research. We view high cognitive aptitudes or achievements as one indicator of giftedness (e.g., following Subotnik et al., 2011), with full recognition that there are many other much broader conceptualizations of what being gifted means. From a measurement perspective, it makes sense that the developed aptitudes from the Radex configuration should at least be considered an important aspect of a measurable definition of giftedness. Cognitive aptitudes then, as measured by standardized tests, provides an important bridge that connects gifted education research to numerous other disciplines across the social sciences.