A DEVELOPMENTALIST'S VIEW OF GIFTEDNESS

Orienting a definition to educational issues limits one view of the field in ways that a developmental psychologist actually finds quite comfortable. Aside from simplifying matters by centering on academic domains that constitute the agenda we set for young people, one can focus on childhood, during which developmental trajectories can be described and mapped; one can define giftedness as precocity, or a rapid pace of development; and one need not worry so much about the future as the present, or worry about productivity to the exclusion of promise. Furthermore, because of near-universal schooling, it is feasible to use cross-age methods to describe the maturity of children we define as gifted. (Not that we do this very often.) None of these aspects makes much sense if we are talking about gifted adults.

Factor-Analytic Hierarchy of Abilities

I am content to borrow John Carroll's (1993) factor-analytic conception of g, or general intelligence, as a basic guide. This is where a bit of autobiography may be relevant. All my post-secondary degrees, and my late husband's, are from Stanford University, that bastion of g-dom. Maud Merrill, coauthor of the 1937 and 1960 Stanford–Binet scales, was our mentor. The next 10 years (1959–1969) we spent at a bastion of factor analysis, the University of North Carolina. Although L. L. Thurstone (1938) died a few years before we arrived and Carroll arrived at Chapel Hill a few years after we left, it is not surprising that I should choose this view of abilities.