Giftedness: a biologically rooted concept that serves as a label for a high level of intelligence and indicates an advanced and accelerated development of functions within the brain. Such development may express itself in high levels of cognitive, affective, physical sensing, and/or intuitive abilities, such as academic aptitude, insight and innovation, creative behavior, leadership, personal and/or interpersonal skill, or visual and performing arts.
Gifted Individuals: are those who perform, or show promise of performing, at high levels in any such areas and who, because of such advanced and accelerated development, require services or activities not ordinarily provided by the schools.
Talent Development: involves the deliberate and planned effort to provide children with a responsive learning environment both at home and at school so that all of their talents and abilities will have the opportunity to develop at maximum levels. Such appropriate levels of stimulation will allow high levels of intelligence to develop in a variety of forms and expressions and will result in increased numbers of individuals performing at the level of giftedness. While this is often a part of a comprehensive gifted and talented program, it is not a gifted program in and of itself.
Additional Definitions:
Gifted and talented children and youth are those students with outstanding abilities, identified at preschool, elementary, and secondary levels. These students are capable of high performance when compared to others of similar age, experience, and environment, and represent the diverse populations of our communities. These are students whose potential requires differentiated and challenging educational programs and/or services beyond those provided in the general school program. Students capable of high performance include those with demonstrated achievement or potential ability in any one or more of the following areas: general intellectual, specific academic subjects, creativity, leadership and visual and performing arts.
General intellectual ability: Students who demonstrate a high aptitude for abstract reasoning and conceptualization, who master skills and concepts quickly, and/or exhibit advanced critical thinking capability.
Specific academic aptitude: Students who evidence extraordinary learning ability in one or more specific disciplines.
Creative and critical thinking: Students who are highly insightful, imaginative, and innovative, who consistently assimilate and synthesize seemingly unrelated information to create new and novel solutions for conventional tasks, and who can interpret, analyze and evaluate information.
Leadership ability: Students who emerge as leaders, and who demonstrate high ability to accomplish group goals by working with and through others.
Visual and performing arts: Students who are consistently superior in the development of a product or performance in any of the visual and performing arts.
Differentiated: Modifications to the existing curriculum based on the academic needs, interests, and learning styles of students with different ability levels, which often involve increasing the scope, depth and pace at which topics are taught to gifted students.
Diverse: Populations made up of group members who differ on a variety of characteristics, such as race, culture, social-economic status and language.
Identified: A data gathering process designed to answer questions and make decisions about students’ academic ability, characteristics and behavior in order to plan appropriate curricular modifications for the students.
Programs: A curriculum that includes services and/or activities geared toward achieving a specific goal for program participants.