Gifted children: Current trends and issues

Psychosocial development in intellectually gifted children.

“…The standard-indeed, the repetitive-finding of reviewers is that intellectually gifted preadolescent children tend to show average or superior adjustment (Carroll & Laming, 1974;Getzels & Dillon, 1973;Khoury & Appel, 1977;Miles, 1954;Monks & Ferguson, 1983). Terman was the first to draw this conclusion, which he supported for both preadolescents and adolescents with a wide range of self-report inventories (e.g., Cady's [ 19231 version of the Woodward Personality Inventory) and character trait ratings by parents and teachers (Burks, Jensen, & Terman, 1930;Terman, 1925).…”

“…A combination of stressors (Khoury & Appel, 1977;Manaster & Powell, 1983) complicates life for highly gifted children. Many experience unusual emotional distance from or closeness to their parents (Albert, 1978) and extraordinary intellectual demands (Bloom, 1982;Fowler, 1981).…”

In Favor of Acceleration for Gifted Students

“…Some research (Josephina, 1958) has characterized the gifted as being actually (academically) retarded when their achievements are compared to their abilities. Khoury and Appel (1977) reviewed several sources that indicated problem areas for the gifted such as underachievement, inequality of opportunities, feelings of being different, special expectations, lack of adult models, stereotyping by others, masking of talents to be accepted, oversolicitous parents, and imbalance between social and emotional development and intellectual development.…”