Putting the Research to Use: The results of this study provide some key insights into the specific aspects of raising a gifted and talented child which parents struggle with, and the sorts of information they would like to receive to assist them in their role. The findings have led to the development and tailoring of a parenting intervention for parents of gifted and talented children, and have the potential to inform further research to support parents.

Putting the Research to Use: The study promotes a better appreciation of the distinction between positive and negative perfectionism and the reality of the different types of perfectionists. With this view, educators, teachers, and parents should be careful to avoid assuming that all perfectionistic tendencies are dysfunctional or all perfectionists are maladaptive or unhealthy. More important, education practitioners should encourage students to strive for excellence with mastery goals of learning. In addition, students should not only be helped to set high standards and meet challenging goals with good planning and organization, they should also learn to recognize their own limitations and to appreciate that mistakes and failures are normal, informative, and situation specific. To promote positive perfectionism among students, this study suggests that one effective means might lie in efforts to enhance emotional intelligence through, for example, promoting emotional literacy or emotion-focused interventions.

Putting the Research to Use: To date, there is a paucity of research-based, challenging mathematics curriculum units designed specifically for mathematically promising elementary students. As a result, gifted programming for these students, if it exists within a district, often involves a collection of assorted math puzzles and problems or an above-grade-level textbook that was written for the average student. The findings from this curriculum study suggest to practitioners that mathematics curriculum units that are challenging and engaging with a focus on important math concepts and that encourage students to think and act like practicing mathematicians contribute to students' math achievement. The fact that this study was replicated with a second cohort strengthens the result. In addition, since almost 50% of the students came from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, the study illustrates that the curriculum was highly effective with this special population, while meeting the needs of all talented students.

Putting the Research to Use: This study, by incorporating instructional factors in the framework of self-regulated learning of gifted students, extended the previous research that had examined the relationships among the components of self-regulated learning in relation to achievement. Also, it explored such relationships in a much less studied area, science, and extended the scope of science achievement by including scientific inquiry skills as a criterion of academic performance. In general, it reveals that inquiry learning increases gifted students' scientific inquiry skills while open inquiry does not contribute much to this process and that the only learner characteristic influencing scientific inquiry skills is self-efficacy. For educators working with scientifically gifted students, this study urges them to plan open inquiry learning more systematically and make it accessible to students, by providing assistance and guidance with the inquiry process at the outset of learning and increasingly incorporating the open nature of inquiry. Motivational beliefs of gifted students in their abilities also need to be encouraged and fostered in the classroom.

Putting the Research to Use: Previous literature reviews about profoundly gifted students with social impairments have cautioned against misdiagnosis (Webb et al., 2005) of psychological disorders. These psychologists posit that social impairments are primarily the result of social-emotional vulnerability associated with very high IQs. Further, they argue that concomitant social difficulties are characteristics of giftedness, not indicators of a disability. We compared two profoundly gifted girls, each with social difficulties, who are virtually identical in their cognitive and achievement profiles. Our comparison reveal the importance of basing conclusions about social impairments on comprehensive assessments that use measures uniquely designed to distinguish between "difficulty" and "disability." We demonstrate that although "misdiagnosis" is a possibility with profoundly gifted children, the greater risk is "missed" diagnosis, which precludes the opportunity for appropriate intervention. In today's atmosphere of "anti-testing" it is important to advocate for a comprehensive assessment with the necessary measures to understand the degree of social impairment.

Putting the Research to Use: This study provides evidence that gifted children show differential development, in this case more rapid learning, from the first year of life. It also demonstrates how responsive parental interactions can support this advanced development. For family and professional caregivers, the findings imply that optimum caregiving for the young gifted child involves interactions that are both responsive to individual potential and appropriately challenging. In regard to the methodological challenges of researching early giftedness, the study demonstrated that the constructs of the ZPD and scaffolding were useful frameworks for investigating early gifted development and caregiver influences on that development. Pretend play activity was also shown to be an effective measure and a useful context for the study of gifted development in infants and toddlers. It would be valuable for future researchers in this area to utilize similar approaches that are grounded in the unique developmental characteristics of young children, and that aim to account for the interactive contexts that are so important in children's lives. The field of gifted education, in general, would also benefit from an increased awareness and exploration of the role of play in the development of intellect, imagination and creativity.

Putting the Research to Use: Findings from this study highlight the need for carefully collected data in the field of gifted education concerning race and ethnicity of students in programs and provide the reader with a picture of both underrepresentation and overrepresentation of students by state and ethnic group. Attention needs to be paid to sub-groups within categories of race and ethnicity to understand representation. By considering the issue of Asian Americans and their overrepresentation, this research has raised awareness about factors, such as identification processes, acculturation, and academic motivation that might promote recognition of giftedness among some ethnic groups. Finally, this research offers readers with a new, multiple-year, current, analysis of the representation in gifted programs nationally and by state for racial/ethnic groups, an area of continued concern to those in the field of gifted education.

Putting the Research to Use: There is a growing demand for programs and initiatives to achieve the goal of reducing or eliminating the achievement differences between high-potential White or Asian students and high- potential African-American or Hispanic students. Designing effective programs requires attention to and understanding of not only the cognitive variables involved, but also the affective variables. Studying the feelings and perceptions of Project EXCITE students who invested over 400 hours of their time over a six-year period by attending out-of-school classes and studying the feelings and perceptions of their parents offer a new look at some key affective variables that impact the achievement gap. Variables such as a student's sense of belonging, self-confidence, and social network, as well as parental aspirations, must be considered in the design of any program that intends to close the achievement gap.

Putting the Research to Use: Empirical research examining the unique social and emotional needs of gifted adolescents is at a critical juncture. Both educators and researchers have become increasingly aware that giftedness, in whatever form, has unique influences on the social and emotional development of gifted adolescents. In line with previous findings, results in the current study suggest that for both gifted and nongifted adolescents, social support at home and at school can play an important role in reducing problems (i.e. depression) and at the same time enhancing resiliency. It is time, as Ford (1994) has suggested, for educators and researchers to take substantial steps to strengthen the "family-school-community" link in order to provide adequate social support in the many contexts that both gifted and nongifted adolescents live (Bronfenbrenner, 1977).

Putting the Research to Use: Assessing and identifying students with visual arts talents to support their artistic development often constitutes a problem in schools where no resident artists could be readily called on to help make the judgment. This study on judging drawing abilities of students offers grounds for optimism in demonstrating that lay judges could make judgments approaching those of visual artists, especially when these lay judges were provided with guidelines based on the verbalized criteria of expert judges. The set of guidelines developed in this study also serves as an example for future development of simpler and more refined guidelines that hold promise for applications in multicultural settings.

Putting the Research to Use: Schools are inherently sccial enterprises. Research has demonstrated that students with gifts and talents often learn coping behaviors to navigate the social milieus of their schools. Because students have agency, they have the capability to modify their social coping strategies based on their perceptions and social goals. This paper sheds light on both the soical coping behaviors of 300 academically gifted students upon entering a residental school for gifted adolescents and how they adapted to the new community over a two-period. The results of this study allow the reader to understand the complexities of school environments as social contexts and how students with gifts and talents cope with them.

Putting the Research to Use: Gifted students may not communicate their distress to adults who are invested in their achievement or non-achievement. Significant adults therefore might wisely keep the findings in this study in mind as they interact with them. Inquiring casually about how the students are feeling or how they are managing high-stress times in the academic or extra-curricular year might be appreciated and potentially helpful. Though habits of achievement may help them to maintain high grades and high levels of extra-curricular performance, achievers might quietly experience high levels of stress from their heavy involvements in or outside of school. Low achievement and a high number of absences may also reflect personal stress in gifted students. Showing non-voyeuristic, holistic interest in gifted students as complex individuals, gently commenting when they seem "flat," not fueling ultra-competitive attitudes, and offering credible comments about personal strengths and resilience might offer crucial support at a time of vulnerability.

Putting the Research to Use: In this study, we found that accelerated students have a more positive academic self-concept than their nonaccelerated classmates. We also found, however, indications that accelerated students, especially boys, in their first two years in secondary school (Grades 7 and 8 in the U.S. secondary educational system), have a more negative social status than their classmates. Many empirical studies and practitioners' experiences with gifted students point at the benefits of acceleration and the negative consequences of not accelerating a child. So, to abolish acceleration is not a realistic option. We should, however, take into account that accelerated students might have a more negative social status than their classmates. Knowledgeable teachers, with a positive attitude toward accelerated students, should be alert about possible prejudices of classmates and should aim for an accepting, tolerating climate in the classroom.