Despite going through gifted education programs myself, I'm deeply skeptical of the concept of them in general, and I've only become more skeptical as new research emerged. Here's a good example for why I'm skeptical:
>There is evidence that aspects of gifted education should influence education more broadly. Project Bright Idea, developed at Duke University, saw 10,000 typical nursery and primary-school pupils taught using methods often reserved for brainier kids—fostering high expectations, complex problem-solving and cultivating meta-cognition (or “thinking about thinking”). Nearly every one of them went on to do much better on tests than similar peers.
Another way to phrase this is that this study demonstrated that people may become "high-achieving" because of gifted education programs, and not the other way around. Or perhaps typical pupils can become high-achieving by exposure to high-achieving pupils.
The article's refutation of these ideas is the King's College study that determined that "50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable." Plomin's more recent (2015) research suggests this estimate was far too high, and should really be about 30% phenotypically, which makes me think there's no point in trying to find young Einsteins. If students are of average or slightly above average intelligence, Bright Idea style programs will be best for them, and if they are truly a "young Einstein," they'll demonstrate it on their own, just like old Einstein did.
>There is evidence that aspects of gifted education should influence education more broadly. Project Bright Idea, developed at Duke University, saw 10,000 typical nursery and primary-school pupils taught using methods often reserved for brainier kids—fostering high expectations, complex problem-solving and cultivating meta-cognition (or “thinking about thinking”). Nearly every one of them went on to do much better on tests than similar peers.
Another way to phrase this is that this study demonstrated that people may become "high-achieving" because of gifted education programs, and not the other way around. Or perhaps typical pupils can become high-achieving by exposure to high-achieving pupils.
The article's refutation of these ideas is the King's College study that determined that "50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable." Plomin's more recent (2015) research suggests this estimate was far too high, and should really be about 30% phenotypically, which makes me think there's no point in trying to find young Einsteins. If students are of average or slightly above average intelligence, Bright Idea style programs will be best for them, and if they are truly a "young Einstein," they'll demonstrate it on their own, just like old Einstein did.