Benchmarking Psychosocial Skills Important for Talent Development

Abstract

How can high potential in childhood be transformed into outstanding adult accomplishment? Research indicates that individuals who become outstanding performers and producers have more than just raw talent in the domain or opportunities to develop their talent—they have the will, drive, and focus to take advantage of the opportunities with which they are presented, and the capacity to persist through failures even as the bar for success gets higher. Despite the importance of these psychosocial facilitators, they are among the least well understood in the field of gifted and talented research. In this study, we reviewed existing literature in order to build comprehensive list of the psychosocial variables associated with talent development across domains (visual art, dance, sports, academics, music, acting, medicine, and software engineering). With the help of psychologists with expertise in these domains, we completed an initial categorization of these skills and asked the experts to indicate at which of the three stages in talent development—the transition of abilities into competencies, competencies into expertise, and expertise to creative productivity or eminence—each psychosocial skill was important. We found promising general patterns of commonality as well as variation by domain and stage of talent development, and discuss the implications of this study on future research into psychosocial skill development.

The Achievement Motivation Enhancement Curriculum: Evaluating an Affective Intervention For Gifted Students

“…Self-regulated students are proactive in their effort to learn and show more adaptive learning behavior, making them more effective at learning and more likely to achieve (Zimmerman, 2002). Various types of self-regulation, including metacognitive, cognitive, and motivational self-regulation, central in the AME curriculum, are essential skills at all stages of talent development (Olszewski-Kubilius et al, 2019; Ziegler & Stoeger, 2019). Therefore, researchers argued that self-regulation is more important for gifted and talented students than their normative peers, assuming these gifted and talented students want to reach excellence in a talent domain (Stoeger et al, 2015).…”

A developmental view of mentoring talented students in academic and nonacademic domains

“…Transitioning further from competence to expertise will involve all the mentoring and teaching available to any talented student in a domain, but underserved students will require extra guidance on where to find competitions, internships, research experiences, or access to high‐level coaching in performance arenas. They will need access to financial resources in some domains, like sports and the arts, and need support from mentors on how to avoid “underminers” who may discourage unusual talent paths or disparage creative ideas that challenge the status quo 31,32 …”

Gifted Classroom Environments and the Creative Process: A Systematic Review

“…The environment that educators cultivate within the larger Big-C culture (i.e., norms, values, power distance, social cognition, and psychology of self) to construct the little-c culture of their gifted classrooms influences whether high-ability students are able to reflect on their failures and successes and develop the psychosocial skills necessary to engage in the creative process and develop their talents (Hennessey, 2015; Lamb, 2020; Subotnik et al, 2011). Of the psychosocial skills “essential to continued involvement in any domain” (Olszewski-Kubilius et al, 2019, p. 2), Rinn and Crutchfield (2020) argued that schools should focus on developing the malleable and reciprocal skills of motivation and self-concept in gifted students. As motivation is the factor that distinguishes gifted individuals who move past domain competence and domain expertise to become eminent and creatively productive (Olszewski-Kubilius et al, 2015), the little-c classroom culture that impacts the motivational orientation of students is an essential element for creative and talent development.…”