Gifted Child Quarterly

Career self-efficacy has been identified as an important variable in career choice and development. In this study, gender and academic achievement were studied in relation to career self-efficacy for female, mate, and sex-balanced occupations. Girls had higher efficacy expectations for some female careers and lower efficacy expectations for some male careers than boys. Girls and boys did not differ in their efficacy expectations for sex-balanced occupations. The overall influence of gender on career self-efficacy was quite modest. Achievement was found to be a more powerful predictor of career self-efficacy than gender. These findings are discussed in relation to the need to enable talented young women to realize their abilities through career achievement.

Leisure activities may predict adult accomplishment better than conventional predictors such as intelligence or school grades because their performance requires not only intellectual abilities, but also task commitment, persistence, and other cognitive and personal-social attributes that determine life outcomes. Research on the leisure activities of young gifted children has been sparse in part because of the lack of psychometric instruments designed for use with children.

The construct validity of the Tel-Aviv Activities Inventory, a measure of leisure activities specifically designed for children and adolescents was investigated in 934 junior/senior high school students. The 62 activities inventory items were entered for factor analysis. The 10-factor maximum likelihood solution with varimax rotation was selected, resulting in extracting factors most similar to the hypothesized factor structure. The results indicated that the instrument may be useful for career counseling with gifted and talented children. Recommendations for the revision of the current edition of the instrument are suggested.

Over 40 different descriptions of aptitudes and talents were distributed among nine experimental peer nomination forms (PNF). These PNFs were administered to two large samples of elementary and junior high school pupils and to their teachers. Sex ratios were computed for each ability among those pupils who emerged as the 10% to 15% ablest in their group as independently judged by their peers and teachers. No less than 60% of the 42 items had a significant overrepresentation of girls (or boys); these ratios exceeded 2:1 in a majority of cases. Boys were judged to be more talented in physical aptitudes and technical talents, and girls were judged to be more talented in arts (especially music) and socioaffective aptitudes. Intercorrelations between data from six different samples showed a very high reproducibility of these sex ratios, regardless of whether the judges were peers or teachers or whether samples came from elementary or junior high schools. Various arguments are presented to demonstrate that these judgments by peers and teachers accurately represent the differential abilities manifested by boys and girls in the school environment.

Precocious literacy is a form of intellectual giftedness that occurs frequently in young children. This case study documents the emergence of reading ability in an extremely precocious reader between the ages of 2 years 7 months and 3 years 2 months. At the end of this period, the child's word recognition ability was conservatively estimated at the late first-grade level, and he was able to use knowledge of some level of letter-sound correspondences to sound out unfamiliar words and pseudowords. However, his writing skills did not begin to develop to a comparable degree until after he was 4 years old. The results are used to generate hypotheses about the nature and measurement of precocious reading and its relations with oral language and writing skills.

The WISC-R profiles of 456 Grade 3 students with full scale IQs of 120 and above were analyzed. Large subtest scatter, verbal-performance discrepancy, and idiographic variability appear to be normal for the test profiles of bright students. They excelled in complex reasoning but were often not different from average students in their attention span, memory, sequential reasoning, visual-spatial perception, or visual-motor coordination. Differences were identified in subgroups according to verbal or nonverbal strengths and gender. Boys showed strengths for simultaneous and visual-spatial reasoning, and girls showed strengths for sequential and social reasoning. Academic achievement varied as a function of full scale IQ and verbal or nonverbal strengths. Implications for educational programming are discussed.

Educators and parents of gifted students have many concerns as current movements of educational restructuring and reform sweep the country. However, unparalleled opportunities emerge from the swelling interest in education that focuses on the individual learning needs of all students. This interest should be perceived as a window of opportunity. In order to take advantage of the opportunities, gifted program personnel will want to keep an open mind toward concepts such as inclusion and collabora tion. Without giving up the cause as champions of differentiated learning opportunities for highly able students, they can be accepted at last as key conversants in the educational dialogue. Then they can work in more integrative and productive ways with general classroom teachers, administrators, parents, and community leaders to develop exceptional student potential.