Giftedness Is Not What It Used to Be, School Is Not What It Used to Be, Their Future, and Why Psychologists in Education Should Care

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Giftedness Is Not What It Used to Be, School Is Not What It Used to Be,

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Giftedness Is Not What It Used to Be, School Is Not What It Used to Be, Their Future, and Why Psychologists in Education Should Care1

Bruce M. Shore1

Abstract

For some three decades psychologists and educators have been working with incomplete or outdated ideas of what constitutes giftedness. Conceptual leadership in the field has moved from a definition based on IQ to expertise- and cognitive science-based definitions. Practice lags behind. Similarly, curriculum concepts are changing to foci based on thinking processes and cognitive apprenticeships, communities of learners, teachers and students as coconstructors of curriculum, and inquiry skills and knowledge as explicit parts of the objectives. Practice there also lags behind, but the shift is underway. This discussion elaborates on these two evolving phenomena, illustrated especially by studies completed and underway in the author’s laboratory group at McGill. It juxtaposes central ideas in gifted education, expertise, and inquiry-driven teaching and learning, and illustrates how these strands can come together for the benefit of all students—albeit sometimes in different ways.

Résumé

Depuis quelque trois décennies, psychologues et éducateurs travaillent à partir d’idées incomplètes et dépassées sur ce qui constitue le talent. Le leadership conceptuel est passé, dans ce domaine, d’une définition basée sur le quotient intellectuel à des définitions relevant de l’expertise et des notions cognitives s’appuyant sur la science. Le côté pratique est également en retard. De même, les concepts de curriculum sont

1McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Corresponding Author:Bruce M. Shore, Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, McGill University, 3700 McTavish Street, Montréal QC Canada H3A 1Y2Email: [email protected]

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152 Canadian Journal of School Psychology 25(2)

en train de changer d’optiques; ils tiennent compte des processus de réflexion et des apprentissages cognitifs, où les collectivités d’apprenants, d’enseignants et d’étudiants sont co-constructeurs du curriculum, et considèrent les aptitudes en recherche et la connaissance en tant que parties explicites des objectifs. Là encore, le côté pratique accuse du retard, quoique le changement soit amorcé. Cette discussion porte sur l’évolution de ces deux phénomènes, illustrée spécialement par des études en cours ou terminées par notre laboratoire à l’Université McGill. Nous y juxtaposons des idées centrales sur l’éducation des talentueux, sur l’expertise, l’enseignement et l’apprentissage par le questionnement, et nous illustrons de quelles façons ces fils conducteurs peuvent former un tout au profit de tous les étudiants, quoique parfois de manières différentes.

Keywords

giftedness, gifted education, expertise, inquiry-based teaching and learning

I am very grateful to the Psychologists in Education section of the Canadian Psycho-logical Association for this opportunity to share some of my interests with you, and perhaps to pique your interest in addressing these questions.

I have been interested in giftedness and very able learners since the time I started teaching high school mathematics in 1967 and throughout my academic life since 1971. I prefer to talk about giftedness, rather than gifted children, because there is a lot of discomfort created by the label “gifted.” Regardless of the label, bright people sometimes get a raw deal in school, and also in life. Yet being gifted is normal, too.

My plan is to share some thoughts and broad strokes of research about three ideas around which my writing and scholarship have been built: (a) intellectual giftedness, (b) expertise and its development, and (c) inquiry-based teaching and learning. I shall try to loosely weave these together in a way that provides insight into some of the good things that are happening in education and that need to happen more.

Idea 1: Intellectual GiftednessWe should care about understanding what high ability means, and perhaps challenge some related myths. Generally, bright people are useful to society. That is fair, but as long as they are children, I have difficulty shouldering them with the responsibility to be especially useful to society. I do agree that, through service and social education, we should graduate everyone with a commitment to do some good for others and at least do no harm.

Unfortunately, bright children and the idea of giftedness must endure several neg-ative stereotypes. Gary Larson’s insightful and funny cartoon series, The Far Side, once featured an apparently young person, rather overweight and bespeckled, alone in the scene, pushing on a door labeled “pull” near a sign “Midvale School for the Gifted.” When asked what is the message of this cartoon and what stereotypes are



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conveyed, audiences (including those at the CPA presentation) readily provide a long list, such as

• book smart but very likely not street smart,• in poor physical shape,• not physically attractive,• alone and without friends,• inattentive to time and other realities (e.g., missed the bus),• in a Homer Simpson sort of way, adultlike, not a child,• in school, not a dropout,• presumably male.

In contrast, we have known for decades, actually, close to a century, that these stereotypes are false. Here are five examples of the broken stereotypes, and I shall return to some of them later. For example, classic studies such as those initiated by Terman (1925) and followed up over decades (e.g., Terman & Oden, 1959) have shown that

• book-smart is not incompatible with street-smart;• bright folks are at least as healthy as others, and susceptible to the same

problems;• they are as tuned in to social and other issues as much as anyone else;• they include boys and girls, men and women, and every other variety of

humanity;• they are frequently regarded as quite attractive by their peers.

We have started looking at gifted students’ friendships (Schapiro, Schneider, Shore, Margison, & Udvari, 2009) and preferences in terms of working with others in differ-ent kinds of learning environments (French & Shore, 2009). According to our pre-liminary results, they do not especially or always want to be or work alone; they just might be fussier about the activities in which they engage with others, about whom they work with, and who chooses with whom they want to work. They want to avoid free-ridership (Olson, 1965); an important variable appears to be that they need to feel supported by the learning situation, the quality of the curriculum, and the people around them. They are also more willing to compete for fun (rather than to win) with-out negative impact on their friendships. We are now studying the possibility that they may have more varied friendships in which each serves more particular purposes in their lives as well as how many friends and what kinds of friendships they would like, compared to others. Surprisingly these very basic questions have not been extensively studied. Perhaps, not surprisingly, their assumed preference to work alone is real in some situations but not universal. They are children even if they think and talk like adults at times and need the hugs, attention, and boundaries from which every child benefits. Bright people also have a sense of humour, sometimes an unusual sense of




humour, and appreciate it in others. Forty years ago, a study of bright students found that two of the qualities they valued especially in their teachers were fairness and sense of humour (Bishop, 1968)

The ubiquitous IQ. For most of the last century, giftedness meant a high IQ. That is unfortunate. Because it is seemingly easy to measure, and more is presumably better, IQ testing, which is certainly useful, has become so dominant that it has actually become a problem. A golden rule in evaluation is that not everything that is important can be measured and not everything that can be measured is important. Evaluation is only partly about measuring; it is mostly about making decisions. As this audience knows, IQ tests are what we call power tests. Getting a high score reflects that the test taker has provided a large number of correct answers to highly specific questions that have predetermined right answers, in the shortest possible time, to a person who already knows the most likely correct answers. Is that more important than kindness and social responsibility?

Psychologists also know the history of the IQ from Alfred Binet and his student Theodore Simon and their enlightened contract from the schools of the Paris prefec-ture to find a way to identify children who might need extra help to succeed. From that work came the idea of mental age. Of course we do not stop growing intellectually and creatively at 16, but that just illustrates that useful ideas like “mental age” have their limitations. After the U.S. Army borrowed the idea of Mental Age to create the Army Alpha test to screen applicants for the officer corps in World War I, Lewis Terman at Stanford University created standardized procedures that led to the Stanford-Binet title, and the division of mental age by chronological age that started the ambitiously named intelligence quotient on its way.

The IQ was likely the most important 20th century event in the history of this fuzzy thing called giftedness. I shall mention some earlier events in a few minutes. For better or worse, mostly worse, IQ dominates definitional practices and legislation providing programs for highly able students, where such provisions exist. (Such provisions are rare in Quebec, where I work, because of anti-elitism rhetoric, and they are scarce enough elsewhere.)

The invention of the IQ itself spawned an important research project as well. In the 1920s Terman (1925), Oden, and their successors started their half-century follow-up of about 1,600 school children who had done very well (over 120) on the standardiza-tion of Terman’s new test. The children in that sample have come to be known as “Termites,” and there were many in Saskatchewan because of a senior education offi-cial having been in Terman’s lab at the time. At least two of those drifted to McGill, a biologist and former dean of graduate studies and a professor of counselling psychol-ogy. Even though that was a rather unrepresentative sample in terms of the total population (just reflect on who was in school across North America in 1920 and soci-etal roles), we learned a lot from those longitudinal studies, especially shattering the Midvale School myths that somehow persist.

To illustrate what has been wrong with the Siamese twinning of IQ and giftedness, I shall use an oversimplified example that starts to probe the kinds of thinking that



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need to be valued more. Better examples will follow. Imagine a number-series task such as 2, 4, 6, 8. When asked what comes next most people reply “10.” We can drill a little more deeply by asking for the pattern or the rule. Could there be another answer than “10”? Can you give me another possibly correct answer? So, what if I told you “10” was the wrong reply? It could be any number greater than 8, for example. Or what if I gave you 2, 4, 6, 8, 11? Would the next number be 14 or 15? There could be a reasonable rule for either.

Here now are the first 8 numbers: 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 18. Many people reply “22” and can generate the rule that we count positive integers by twos and skip the ones that end in zero. However, this is merely the most likely correct answer. There is nothing uniquely correct about it. An inquisitive and creative person could think up many answers to this question with plausible rules. How about the next numbers being 102, 104, 106, 108, 112, 114, 116, 118, 120 (yes 120!), in which case the rule would be considerably more complex but likely of interest to a bright preadolescent? Continu-ing experience with such varied and irregular problems would make a different kind of impression than 2, 4, 6, 8. This new impression would be that the world is complex and quirky, but even complex events are subject to analysis and systematic description from which we could make some predictions. Such a statement hints of the goals of science and mathematics, indeed, most scholarly disciplines.

Going more deeply with more varied and complex tasks tells us more about think-ing, about how responders perceive, seek, and make sense of patterns in their world.

Consider a “schoolish” question: Which of the following seems like a better ques-tion to you? (a) When was Confederation? (b) What might the political map north of the USA “48” look like today if Sir Georges Etienne Cartier and Sir John A. Macdonald had been assassinated in 1866? Why might (b) be a better question in general? Among many possibilities, it subsumes (a), it does not have one correct right answer, all answers need to be defended, it is complex, it has direct links to issues such as the history and literature of political assassinations (thence to Julius Caesar and the study of the Roman Empire) to D’Arcy McGee, John Kennedy, Fidel Castro (he just happened to survive the attempts), and so on. (This could be extended to mathematical tools to graph and describe such events.) Compare those to another question: Here is a reading about Con-federation. Come to class tomorrow with a question about events that we have never heard of and perhaps never happened but which might have changed the outcome of the Québec and Charlottetown meetings. Or, suppose the 1837 English-Montréal mob had never burned down the Parliament buildings on Youville Square . . .

One problem we face is that there are many definitions of giftedness, and societies have been struggling with this challenge for millennia. Plato referred to children of gold, silver, and bronze. The Jewish Passover service includes a story about three sons (if created today we should probably substitute “daughters” in rotation), one of whom asks a good question that is not egocentric and is the hero of the tale: The lessons of history (the Exodus in particular) are not about you or me alone, but us. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1869/1979) wrote a book, Hereditary Genius, about the sons of distinguished gentlemen (sorry!).




Surprisingly, perhaps, Terman’s IQ was actually an important move forward in understanding giftedness. It essentially referred to children who could perform accu-rately and rapidly on fairly basic, culturally valued tasks, developmentally at a level beyond their own age. That was a very good alternative a century ago. But we now recognize that we also have socially and musically and mathematically and other spe-cific kinds of gifted people. We have high achievers, potential high achievers, creative, and caring kinds of giftedness.

One argument that I shall not address further is whether or not the content of the tasks within IQ tests should be allowed to dominate the content of what we mean broadly by the word intelligence. There is also the problem of how important are speed and accuracy. The common wisdom is that gifted people learn better and faster, but better needs to be defined, and faster is not always true. In general, accuracy trumps speed in performance on IQ tests (Lajoie & Shore, 1987). Perhaps that means we should not worry about time limits. Yet some human decision making is extensively time lim-ited, for example, certain medical decisions, many actions of a pilot or police officer, or anyone when driving. Most decisions, however, benefit from considered reflection or anticipation. That variety is not part of past definitions of giftedness.

What is smart? In parallel, it is important that we focus not on labeling children, and move from asking who is smart to understanding what is smart. I tried to indicate that direction in the number-series examples. Being smart is changing its meaning away from knowing the answers to basic questions to which people already know the answers. Trivia games are fun, but should they drive as critical a concept as intelligence or gift-edness? Consider our current economic and political situations. Should we seek political and economic leaders who immediately knew all the right answers a year ago? Or is there something more to being smart or bright or gifted, such as coming up with good questions? Having broad interests? Recognizing good and bad evidence? Making good judgments with incomplete information? Making ethical choices? Balancing many and perhaps contradictory ideas simultaneously and making some sense of them? Speaking out to authority in the face of injustice? In practice and away from specialists’ labels, children and adults whom we call smart do these things.

Our old ideas about giftedness or being smart include thinking quickly, knowing a lot of right answers, having a good memory, and using or understanding big words. Newer ideas about abilities and giftedness are based on theories of expertise.

Idea 2: Expertise and Its DevelopmentIn some current research, we have been asking teachers about the extent to which their students are becoming like “experts” in whatever they are studying. We have received an interesting and initially surprising reaction. Nearly to a person they have protested the question: How can a child be an expert? “An expert?—that is such a high level that I would not even think of myself in such terms?” We certainly made an error in posing the question without sufficient preparation, in that we did not discuss what we meant by the term expert. After all, many common words are given different meanings in



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different contexts. Some of our teacher participants use the word “expert” in a general sense. As with “intelligent,” we sometimes assume that it is an overall or universal quality of the person, not a quality of performance on a particular task in a particular context. How can we come to agree that we can be expert at some things without being an expert at everything?

For example, the amazing folks on Antiques Roadshow who identify and value 3,000-year-old Chinese sculptures or 17th-century pocket watches are certainly experts, but maybe they cannot with equal proficiency cook, drive a tractor trailer, do calculus or brain surgery, recombine DNA, repair a window blind, or write novels. What distinguishes an expert from other people? This is a central question for psy-chologists in education.

This question drove a large part of cognitive psychology in the second half of the 20th century, and it has generated fields such as expert systems, helped educate better chess players (figure out what the masters do and learn to do that), automobile diag-nostic computers (figure out what expert mechanics do and emulate that), and improve medical diagnosis (figure out what outstanding physicians do then copy and teach that process).

Here are some of the ways in which experts think differently from other people, regardless of the domain or subject. There are many, but this is a selection of 10 points (for original sources, including some of our own work, see, for example, Coleman & Shore, 1991; Kaizer & Shore, 1995; Maniatis, Cartwright, & Shore, 1998; Pelletier & Shore, 2003; Shore & Lazar, 1996) around which I am organizing the rest of this discussion. Comparing experts and novices, experts

1. have more knowledge about a topic and retrieve and use that knowledge more quickly to solve problems;

2. develop better self-regulatory processes such as self-monitoring (metacognition);

3. take longer pauses when they gather the relevant information they need to work on a problem;

4. develop automaticity on basic processes and free up their working memory to address the main issues (think of knowing your times table so well that you do not need to take time on the arithmetic while calculating your income tax);

5. are goal driven; 6. are very able to multiply and meaningfully represent a problem (think of

changing algebra word problems into formulae); 7. solve problems using a “forward” strategy (think of the chess player consid-

ering the consequences many moves ahead of each decision); 8. categorize problems into meaningful groups that bring relevant solutions

into focus; 9. can tell the difference between good evidence and irrelevant evidence; and10. prefer complex and novel problems.




An important quality of expertise is that it develops with experience and coaching (for example, as in Vygotsky’s social constructivism and the zone of proximal devel-opment). I am not going to say too much about this, except to put the word in context. Development with regard to children or adults and abilities is growth with change. For teachers it is taken into account with regard to the school years, roughly ages 4 to 17, about the same range that engaged Alfred Binet a century ago.

The ways we think change and grow with experience and age are especially dra-matic in childhood, but they do not end at 16. Age brings neural changes that facilitate certain growth, and it also allows time for exposure to more experiences because we are very social animals. In adulthood we add a new term, wisdom (see Sternberg, 1990). The idea of change was also explicit in the numerator of the IQ: Here are some tasks every 4-year-old can do, and at 5, and 6, and so on. The tasks are more important than the numbers. It is built into our legal tradition, for example, in that we do not hold minors or people with cognitive limitations fully responsible for all their actions, and we try to protect them from some experiences that we think might harm them.

Later in this discussion, I will describe some ways in which abilities can grow. Here I just want to highlight that educators can take account of development by changing

• the pedagogical approach;• the complexity of the subject matter;• the amount of time we expect learners to devote to mastering what they are

supposed to learn;• the extent to which teaching, learning, and evaluating responsibilities are

shared; and• the outcomes we expect.

Making these changes brings schooling slowly, unevenly, but inexorably in the direction of a new pedagogical foundation. That foundation is called inquiry, and it will be my vehicle for connecting giftedness, expertise, and the changing curriculum that psychologists in education and otherwise working with young people should very much care about.

Idea 3: Inquiry-Based Teaching and LearningThere are not many people in urbanized Canada (or elsewhere) still driving a horse or Model T, who can recommend a good blacksmith or who sells the best sasparilla in town. IQ made very good sense as a dominant definition of giftedness or intellectual ability in general when school learning was mostly about memorizing (think of spelling bees), giving right answers (remember Reach for the Top), making simple connections (perhaps Jeopardy), and sitting quietly with hands folded in rows of isolated chairs and desks from which passing a note or whispering or dipping that ponytail in the ink well could get you severely reprimanded, and speaking was permitted only when spoken to



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by the teacher. Oh yes, and everybody in the class did exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. At Hallowe’en, there are 34 pie-plate orange pumpkin faces on the notice board. Heaven help the child who made it purple. And, yes, it was wrong to dip that ponytail! Hormones, you know! IQ scores are not terrible in predicting perfor-mance in that context, at least for a year or two ahead, even up to the university level (an equally challenging statement about undergraduate pedagogy, perhaps).

Memory and right answers are of course important. The critical issue is how do we get there. Nearly all 21st-century curriculum reform is about something called inquiry or directly related to inquiry. There was a great fuss about some minor changes in Quebec report cards (comments replacing number or letter grades) a few years ago, and nearly everyone was sidetracked into complaints about the Quebec curricular reform. However, the overall reform (see the Quebec Education Program Web site, http://www.mels.gouv.qc.ca/gr-pub/menu-curricu-a.htm) is brilliant and, beyond the politics, once well implemented, has every prospect of being a trendsetter. It is not alone in the western world. In the Quebec curriculum model, inquiry is subsumed under the heading of cross-curricular competencies. My colleague Mark Aulls and I wrote and edited a couple of books about Inquiry in Education (Aulls & Shore, 2008; Shore, Aulls, & Delcourt, 2008), and we are working with a group of schools to help them develop this curriculum, especially to be able to evaluate outcomes that are dif-ferent from what was present before. Here are a few qualities that distinguish inquiry learning, just to introduce a bit of specificity:

• Curriculum includes students pursuing questions of their own interest.• When introduced to a unit, students ask questions that will generate research

and investigation.• At different points in time, there is a role change between students and teachers

(e.g., question asking, evaluating, leading discussions, choosing readings).• Value is placed on student dialog and collaboration in the learning process.• Students are encouraged to seek out and access new sources of information

that go beyond the class textbook.• Students are given an opportunity to do in-depth study and are given time to

reflect on subject matter and make a contribution to it.

My colleague Alain Breuleux recently brought a fascinating document to my atten-tion. It is a three-volume report on technology standards for teachers from United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO; 2008), but it contains a wonderful statement about what school should be like:

approach[ing] the curriculum goes beyond a focus on knowledge of school sub-jects to explicitly include the 21st century skills that are needed to create new knowledge. Skills such as problem solving, communication, collaboration, experimentation, critical thinking, and creative expression become curricular goals in themselves and these are the objects of new assessment methods.




Perhaps the most significant goal is for students to be able to determine their own learning goals and plans—the ability to establish what they already know, assess their strengths and weaknesses, design a learning plan, stay on task, track their own progress, and build on successes and adjust to failures; skills that can be used throughout a lifetime to participate in a learning society. (p. 9)

My wife Bettina, a gifted early childhood and special educator, reminded me of one instance of how this process starts at home. If we want our young children to acquire an appetite for vegetables and to eventually make good food choices, do not ask them midmeal what vegetables they would like. They probably will not want vegetables. So when they start smelling supper cooking and the saliva starts to flow, bring a dish of cut celery and another of cut broccoli (or carrots, or fruit) and ask which they would prefer—just two choices from the parents’ menu of healthy greens (and other colors). It was fascinating to watch those dishes come back empty. Mean-while, the children learned that they have choices and opinions that will be respected, and gradually they can ask for something to be part of the choice. In classical learning theory, that is the time to develop a passion for fresh veggies. They experience similar development opportunities when they choose their bedtime story, decide their favorite colors, and so on.

As we get older we make more choices. With younger children we ask with which of two chums we should set up a play date. This facilitates later conversations about friendship choices. In school, we can also start with simple choices. If students are to share in curricular decisions, a basic level can be a choice over which topic (initially from just two!) to be addressed next, or which examples should be done for home-work, from a menu of equally good choices. At 18, learners can choose their music, schools, courses, and whether or not to attend regularly. We do not want students to remain dependent on the teacher for the permission to learn and the decision about what to learn. But we cannot effectively make these transitions cold-turkey at age 17.99. The challenge is to figure out what happens in between. That is when school happens, and what happens in school is important and changing. One of our collabora-tors, Frank LaBanca, is the head of a science department in a Connecticut high school. He is in total control of the curriculum but you might never recognize it if you walked into one of his classrooms half way through the term. The students in this laboratory science course come in, they have decided what they need to do that day, and in groups they get on with their experiments to explore the principles they selected earlier. There are no recipe-book so-called experiments in which learners all do the same thing, at the same time, and with the same worn-out equipment. The students have selected topics and had them approved, they have designed the studies, and they are doing them under the teacher’s watchful eye and also with peer support. They discuss their prog-ress online in science chat rooms. They take their own breaks to joke and regain focus. At the end of the unit they make presentations in which they communicate their con-clusions to others, just as in a scientific conference. They become scientists as Jerome Bruner (1960), an important educational theorist of the mid-20th century, said they



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should: by doing what scientists do and coming to understand the world as scientists do, not exclusively by trying to absorb the codified outcomes of what scientists did. We can replace “scientist” with any other occupation or discipline.

The concept of development is important here. Students do not normally become scientists, or poets, or historians, mathematicians, geographers, teachers, or psycholo-gists at the flick of a finger. Perhaps not surprisingly, students are just as wary of inquiry teaching as teachers. Their well-reinforced expectation of school is that the teacher will tell them what to do, when, how, and perhaps (if they are lucky) why. It is not easy to develop personal authority and responsibility.

Just as we must assist the development of number facts, being able to take another person’s perspective and skills in dialog by actually using them in context, so must we provide opportunities to children to develop and sustain their ability to be inquirers. Bruner (1960) championed the idea of a spiral of cumulative curricular experiences at increasing levels of complexity. We should not teach the same things over and over with unvarying repetitiveness. Perhaps parrots and dogs find that kind of learning engaging. Rather, we need to revisit important ideas, skills, and dispositions, each time drawing on what the learners already know or should know, and adding new wrinkles. Some learners can move more quickly and deeply than others along this spiral, or take shortcuts, or along multiple spirals at once, or they can invent their own spirals based on sustained interests (think of music, ecology, art, fixing cars, building cities) and we call those learners bright or smart or gifted, but they are not the sole beneficiaries of respecting development in learning. All learners benefit, but the out-comes are not necessarily the same, as with adults.

As the word inquiry implies, students asking questions is core to the curriculum. They ask not only the teacher, but also each other, so that, when there is no longer a teacher in adult life, they continue learning. As adults, what kind of person is a more desirable colleague or friend: One who waits to be asked a question and hopes he or she knows the right answer, or one who joins in the dialogue in search of interesting questions, alternative answers, and good ways to answer the questions?

One of the qualities of effective inquiry learning is thinking about what kinds of evidence will support potential answers to questions. When the evidence starts to come in, how does one evaluate the stronger from the weaker evidence, the opinion-ated from the authoritative, the easy from the valuable, and the honest from the false?

Inquiry instruction is difficult, probably the underlying reason for raising the dis-tracting ruckus about the much less important report cards. Our research team is currently working with three schools that are trying to make it the core of their daily lives. In one of the elementary schools, one that is committed but early in this pro-cess, an experienced, thoughtful, and dedicated teacher who had not thought of herself as an inquiry teacher told us how she entered accidentally into inquiry teach-ing one day. She needed time to help some students who were having difficulty with some new material, so she created a task for the students who grasped the idea more quickly. She had the latter students bring in a digital camera, and while part of the class got some tutorial help, in context of a unit on ecology, she asked the others to




go off in teams around the school, without disturbing others, and bring back some pictures that could be useful for the unit. To her surprise and delight, the students brought back, among other things, the following pictures:

• a dripping faucet in one of the washrooms;• lights on in the teachers room with nobody in the room; and• litter around the school.

She asked the students to show their pictures to the rest of the class, and to explain what they found and why these images were important. Not only did this exercise bring to life the topics of the ecology unit but also the students posed the underlying ques-tions and decided what evidence was relevant, weighed evidence about the problems, collaborated in doing the work, found supporting materials, and communicated with each other and the teacher in the final product. The bonus was that they had covered by themselves the core material that the teacher thought she would normally have to explicitly present.

We all have a general idea of what inquiry is. Scientists do it. Lawyers do it. Novel-ists do it. Teachers do it. Psychologists do it. Many of us do it in our jobs or creative hobbies whether it is gardening, songwriting, travel, or model trains. When the term is applied to education, it changes students’ skills, powerfully adds to their knowledge, and gives them a higher sense of self-efficacy. And bright students thrive in inquiry environments. The best news is that all students do. And so do adults in real life. And the outcomes are not the same for all.

PhD student Lindsay Borovay and I (2009) did a study in 11 classrooms that were classified into three groups: rarely inquiry (or traditional), sometimes inquiry, and frequently inquiry. We were not looking at the quality of learning but for Csik-szentmihalyi’s (1990) motivational variable called Flow. Flow is a feeling we have all had: You get so deeply into the task at hand that you lose track of time, you do not hear the bell or the call to supper, the task challenges your skills at the upper limit but with effort you know it will be accomplished. Flow is optimal when the challenge of the task and your sense of your abilities are well matched. It is highest when the chal-lenge is perceived as high and we think we have the high-level skills to do it. Musicians call it being in the zone or in the groove. Everyone spends some time in that state of Flow, but it is a little different for bright students. They get there for the sake of the task at hand. The experience is rather more instrumental for other stu-dents: It seems to be tied to the prospect of success and doing well on tests or being engaged by the content more than being in a creative mode. Perhaps the higher achieving students whom we contrasted with average and low-average achieving stu-dents already enjoy enough school success that they do not need to dwell on this. These were our four main results:

• Regardless of ability or the inquiry level of the classroom, all students expe-rienced Flow more often in inquiry activities.



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• Regardless of ability or the inquiry level of the classroom, all students reported experiencing Flow more often in their favourite subject compared to the most recent unit covered (which was a unit highly rated by the teacher).

• Regardless of how much inquiry there was, high achieving students experi-enced more Flow.

• The greatest amount of Flow was reported by high achieving students in inquiry classrooms.

Here is what one of the high achieving students from a primarily traditional class-room said to us in an interview:

We were working on it and it was me and my friends, [everything we had done] was ours, if someone was talking to us we didn’t really notice because we were putting all of our effort on our electricity project . . . it’s like you got all the ideas in your head, you know what the teacher’s saying, you don’t bother asking ques-tions because you know exactly what everything means. It’s a good feeling because you know exactly what you have to do. For the project, I was in the zone, I knew what we had to do and I was really enjoying it.

One of the interesting things here is that education is not just about what we learn by way of information or facts or skills. We also learn dispositions, ways of learning and interacting with others, and to be motivated. The young man—at least we assume it was a young man—trying to get into Midvale School was trying to get in, not out. That is a very good thing.

So that is the second building block, a short introduction to what inquiry means as a part of education. We have known for decades that it is a very good fit to the needs of very able young people and, for that matter, very able adults; I am certain that very few adults would prefer to be told what to do every minute of their lives compared to having some choices and being part of the planning process. What we are learning is that it is also a better way to learn for all students even if the outcomes are different.

Converging toward a new understanding of giftedness. In our research group over the last several decades and also in the lab group headed by Robert Sternberg (for exam-ple, see Sternberg, 2001) who was at Yale until a few years ago, we have been con-cerned to find new ways to talk about giftedness or high ability in children. We wanted to be able to refer to how they think. We were not impressed with the idea that the only thing that these children were better at was getting the right answers quickly to ques-tions that other people already knew the answers to, and the questions were not neces-sarily of great interest to the children or terribly profound. We wanted to know what was going on in their heads that was different. That is what psychologists do; we are interested in the organizing principles of behaviour, and behaviour includes thinking and motivation. It occurred to us to look at the ways experts think, and to see if the children we call gifted or bright or smart, by whatever evidence, showed signs of turn-ing into the people we call experts. Well, here are some of the things we (see Coleman




& Shore, 1991, or Pelletier & Shore, 2003, for more details) and other researchers have found about how these children and adolescents think and learn. Bright, smart, gifted, creative, capable learners

1. have more relevant prior knowledge and are better at calling it up when needed;

2. are more reflective and use metacognition (thinking about your thinking) more when solving problems;

3. take more time on the planning stage of a problem, and relatively more time planning than executing complex tasks;

4. spontaneously generate series of solution steps, not just one at a time; 5. set priorities and can articulate goals; 6. are very able to multiply and meaningfully represent a problem; 7. have greater insight in problem solving and use a forward strategy; 8. are better able to discern the problem that needs to be solved and categorize

the problems more effectively; 9. are more able to distinguish relevant and irrelevant information in a com-

plex problem-solving task; and10. prefer complex problems and make them more complex just to amuse

themselves.

The list should seem familiar. Not accidentally, it reflects the earlier list of qualities of expertise. Of course, I get to choose what goes in the lists, but I assume that is legitimate when trying to develop a thesis! The direct comparison will be made later.

Before concluding, here is just one example of the kind of evidence we have gath-ered to learn about how experts and able students think differently from other people. This example arises from the first point on both lists, namely, the nature of memory. The critical difference in making knowledge retrievable quickly and appropriately has to do with how well each particular piece of learned information is linked to each other and to general categories that can help remember them. For example, if we say “the months of the year” most people can quickly recite them in chronological order or figure out their length with the help of the mnemonic ditty about “30 days hath September” (amusingly using archaic language that would attract a guffaw or puzzle-ment in daily conversation). It is harder to list them in the order of average temperature, hours of daylight, length of the name, or something more obscure.

On little cards, PhD student Lydia Austin (Austin & Shore, 1993) provided each participant with 20 concepts that we selected from a basic college physics course on electricity and magnetism. We gave the students a role of tape and a marker and asked them to tape the cards on a large sheet of paper in groups as they saw fit, to draw lines between the concepts that they thought were related, and to explain on those lines how the related concepts were linked to each other.

Typically, in a physics graduate student’s concept map, every concept was connected to the others, either directly or through others. Strong connections were distinguished



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from average and weak. One expert specifically and appropriately recalled Coulomb’s law as a possibly useful piece of information in a problem that addresses electromo-tive force. Students who were getting high grades in physics had a slightly smaller number of well-explained links, but there were very few concepts not linked to others. Average-achieving students presented numerous concepts that were not connected to others, even if they could be defined in isolation. For low-achieving students, most of the concept tags were not attached to any other. Not even “battery” with “current” in one case. Yet these students could typically define most of the concepts separately, for example in a short-answer or complete-the-blanks question.

The good news is this. We later taught students to do concept maps and they all improved (Austin & Shore, 1994). Not only on their concept maps but also in their performance on multistep, complex physics problems.

How inquiry instruction importantly contributes. Addressing the same list of 10 topics discussed under the headings of giftedness and expertise, these are ways in which inquiry instruction makes sense in addressing ability in ways that respect 21st-century psychological and educational best practices and current theorizing:

1. In dialogue that takes place within inquiry learning, and through the process of asking questions about what they learn, students demonstrate improved memory of core information.

2. Inquiry learning environments place emphasis on reflection and metacogni-tion as learners take increasing responsibility, for example, for monitoring and evaluating their progress.

3. Planning is an explicit part of the inquiry process. 4. Practice in planning the full sequence of steps in a project is an integral part

of inquiry learning. 5. Setting and judging the attainability of goals and subgoals is an early step

in any inquiry process. 6. Representing the problem is a core step in inquiry because most tasks

involve some degree of collaboration or at least effective communication at the conclusion; this demands thinking about how best to present the prob-lem to an appropriate audience, and practising doing it in a supportive environment.

7. Inquiry is goal directed and reflective, and, as in the real world, it is con-ducted with limited resources, both material and time, a result of which is that the consequences of every decision and action need to be projected forward to judge if the process is on the right track.

8. Early in the inquiry process, the inquirer needs to clarify and specify the problem, and determine if there are solutions in related problems, to solve it (this is very different from being given the nicely organized answers in textbooks, answers often without the original and sometimes serendipitous questions that led to the nicely organized material).




9. Evaluating the quality of evidence and deciding what kinds of evidence to seek are core components of engaging in inquiry.

10. Inquiry at every stage is inherently a complex task.

ConclusionBeing smart, gifted, bright—the choice of words is not terribly important—is a pro-cess of developing expertise skills, knowledge, and dispositions that can be applied across learning situations and different subjects. As we grow and develop we also add specific subject-matter expertise to these general intellectual skills. Some of this spe-cific learning can come early, such as about dinosaurs, and some usually comes later, such as about love and nuclear physics. When we think of giftedness as emerging expertise and related intrinsic motivation, and if we value those outcomes, then inquiry-based teaching and learning are the means to get there.

In addition, all 10 parallel items in these lists, and others, can be learned. We can get better at them, from infancy throughout our lives. Think of education as a cata-pult, not a crutch. We can learn to get smart and to stay smart and get smarter. That is why inquiry works—it is not just about the content but also helps people be smarter, even if the outcomes are not always the same. Building intellectual and creative capac-ity is the challenge in a knowledge-based society. We can all benefit from studying how the most able learners and expert adults do it for the benefit of all learners. We can benefit from studying how the most effective learning environments benefit all learners, including the very able despite the muddle of definitions about who they are. Do not avoid it.

For psychologists working in education, including but not limited to school psy-chologists, this means rethinking what it means for a learner to be successful in school. We are, in this profession, as much tied to old ideas as the person who tacked up the 34 pumpkin heads. Student success in an inquiry school includes some of what we have called success in the past, but it now includes a greatly expanded and, frankly, much more interesting array of outcomes in all domains from content to motivation to social skills. Inquiry is changing the teacher’s and the student’s role in education. Psychologists in education are next.

Recall Midvale School for the gifted and our young friend? The child is fine. He is normal, too. Yes, he does need to lose a few kilos. That is normal, too. If we can fix sidewalks so they have ramps that facilitate access by carriages and wheelchairs, we could think about fixing the door so it opens both ways and take some shared respon-sibility for everyone’s success.

For psychologists working in education, the two take-home messages are perhaps these:

• Giftedness can sometimes be a high IQ, but for the most part we have to start realizing that giftedness is evolving expertise, not only domain-general (Keating, 1990) expertise at first but also gradually and increasingly



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domain-specific expertise. From this perspective, giftedness in part at least can be learned under suitable conditions. So this discussion was really not narrowly about giftedness. It was about new ways of understanding the breadth of abilities and learning in children and youth and perhaps even adults. These are new because the school-learning situations are new or are at least starting to change, and to change dramatically. Our evaluation tools have a long way to catch up with these changes.

• Inquiry-based instruction provides the kinds of instructional context, content, process, and strategies to develop expertise and socioaffective dispositions that are critical to 21st-century success. That means underperformance, for example, is not just a question of need for mastery or drill. As students, teach-ers, and schools become more knowledgeable, skilled, comfortable, and eventually fluent with inquiry, school success takes on a much broader mean-ing than individual high marks on mastery tests of material to which the teacher or psychologist already knows the answers. In part, that is because, in inquiry, students co-construct the curriculum, share roles of authority, ask many of the questions, collaborate, design investigations, evaluate the qual-ity of the evidence they generate or accumulate, and learn to evaluate their own progress toward goals they and their mentors create together.

In short, giftedness is not what it used to be, school will not be what it used to be. As expert psychologists working in and devoted to education, we need to reflect on and understand how both are changing to continuously provide a valuable contribu-tion to success by students, teachers, and schools.

Acknowledgment

Nearly four decades of enjoyment and work on these topics would not have been possible with-out the contributions of many gifted students, colleagues, and family who inspire relentlessly—and not all of whom are named in this text.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared that he had no conflicts of interests with respect to his authorship or the publication of this article.

Funding

The author declared that he received no financial support for his research and/or authorship of this article.

References

Aulls, M. W., & Shore, B. M. (2008). Inquiry in education (vol. I): The conceptual foundations for research as a curricular imperative. New York: Erlbaum.

Austin, L. B., & Shore, B. M. (1993). Concept mapping of high and average achieving students, and experts. European Journal for High Ability, 4, 180-195.




Austin, L. B., & Shore, B. M. (1994). The use of concept mapping as an instructional strategy in college-level physics. Scientia Paedagogica Experimentalis, 31, 249-264.

Bishop, W. E. (1968). Successful teachers of the gifted. Exceptional Children, 34, 317-325.Borovay, L. A., & Shore, B. M. (2009). High and average achieving students experiences of

Flow as an outcome of engagement in inquiry-based learning. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. (Manuscript currently under review.)

Bruner, J. S. (1960). The process of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Coleman, E., & Shore, B. M. (1991). Problem-solving processes of high and average perform-

ers in physics. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 14, 366-379.Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper

Perennial.French, L. R., & Shore, B. M. (2009). A reconsideration of the widely held conviction that gifted

students prefer to work alone. Invited chapter in B. Hymer, T. D. Balchin, & D. Matthews (Eds.), The Routledge international companion to gifted education (pp. 176-182 plus refer-ences). London: Routledge.

Galton, F. (1979). Hereditary genius. London: Friedmann. (Original work published 1869)Kaizer, C., & Shore, B. M. (1995). Strategy flexibility in more and less competent students on

mathematical word problems. Creativity Research Journal, 8(1), 77-82.Keating, D. P. (1990). Charting pathways to the development of expertise. Educational Psy-

chologist, 25, 243-267.Lajoie, S. P., & Shore, B. M. (1987). Impulsivity, reflectivity, and high IQ. Gifted Education

International, 4, 139-141.Maniatis, E., Cartwright, G. F., & Shore, B. M. (1998). Giftedness and complexity in a self-

directed computer-based task. Gifted and Talented International, 13, 83-89.Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Pelletier, S., & Shore, B. M. (2003). The gifted learner, the novice, and the expert: Sharpening

emerging views of giftedness. In D. C. Ambrose, L. Cohen, & A. J. Tannenbaum (Eds.), Cre-ative intelligence: Toward theoretic integration (pp. 237-281). New York: Hampton Press.

Schapiro, M., Schneider, B. H., Shore, B. M., & Margison, J. A., & Udvari, S. J. (2009). Com-petitive goal orientations, quality, and stability and friendship in gifted and other adoles-cents’ friendships: A test of Sullivan’s theory about the harm caused by rivalry. Gifted Child Quarterly, 53, 71-88.

Shore, B. M., Aulls, M. W., & Delcourt, M. A. B. (Eds.). (2008). Inquiry in education (vol. II): Overcoming barriers to successful implementation. New York: Erlbaum.

Shore, B. M., & Lazar, L. (1996). IQ-related differences in time allocation during problem solv-ing. Psychological Reports, 78, 848-849.

Sternberg, R. J. (1990). Wisdom: Its nature, origins, and development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Terman, L. M., & Oden, M. H. (1959). Genetic studies of genius: Vol. 5. The gifted group at mid-life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Additional Related Bibliography

Barfurth, M. A., Ritchie, K. C., Irving, J. A., & Shore, B. M. (2009). A metacognitive portrait of gifted learners. In L. V. Shavinina (Ed.), International handbook on giftedness (pp. 397-417). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Springer Science.

Clark, C., & Shore, B. M. (2004). Educating students with high ability (Rev. ed.). Paris: UNESCO.

hannah, c. l., & Shore, B. M. (1995). Metacognition and high intellectual ability: Insights from the study of learning-disabled gifted students. Gifted Child Quarterly, 39, 95-109.

Linn, B., & Shore, B. M. (2008). Critical thinking. In J. A. Plucker & C. M. Callahan (Eds.), Critical issues and practices in gifted education: What the research says (pp. 155-165). Waco, TX: Prufrock Press.

Robinson, A., Shore, B. M., & Enerson, D. L. (2006). Best practices in gifted education: An evidence-based guide. Waco, TX: Prufrock Press.

Rysiew, K. J., Shore, B. M., & Leeb, R. T. (1999). Multipotentiality, giftedness, and career choice: A review. Journal of Counseling and Development, 77, 423-430.

Shore, B. M., Cornell, D. C., Robinson, A., & Ward, V. S. (1991). Recommended practices in gifted education: A critical analysis. New York: Columbia University, Teachers College Press.

Shore, B. M., & Kanevsky, L. S. (1993). Thinking processes: Being and becoming gifted. In K. A. Heller, F. J. Mönks, & A. H. Passow (Eds.), International handbook of research and development of giftedness and talent (pp. 131-145). Oxford, UK: Pergamon.

Shore, B. M., Rejskind, F. G., & Kanevsky, L. S. (2003). Cognitive research on giftedness: A window on creativity. In D. C. Ambrose, L. Cohen, & A. J. Tannenbaum (Eds.), Creative intel-ligence: Toward theoretic integration (pp. 181-210). New York: Hampton Press.

Bio

Bruce M. Shore is a professor of educational psychology in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, and Associate Director (McGill) of the multicampus Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance. He received his BSc, Teaching Diploma, and MA in Education from McGill, taught high school mathemat-ics, and then received his PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Calgary. For 21 years he was jointly appointed as a member of the university’s faculty-development unit. He has also served as Chair of the Department, president of the McGill Association of University Teachers, and Dean of Students. His research addresses the thinking processes associated with intellectual giftedness, the identification and evaluation of outcomes of inquiry-based teaching and learning (including connections to social qualities of giftedness), teaching and learning in higher education, and connections among these topics.

Documents

Giftedness Is Not What It Used to Be, School Is Not What It Used to Be, Their Future, and Why Psychologists in Education Should Care