Understanding Giftedness: Introduction or on the Importance of Seeing Differently

Abstract

This chapter provides a very general introduction to the handbook, thus creating a broad picture on what to expect in the chapters that follow. Specifically, the chapter presents a short overview of the multifaceted research on giftedness and advances in gifted education discussed in the chapters of this handbook. Its uniqueness and novelty are also described. The main contents of each chapter are summarized and approaches taken by chapter authors are briefly described.

We have to find a new view of the world… If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery. It is very nearly impossible, but not quite…

Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate