The New Millennium in Mind Survey: An Assessment of Professional Confidence

The authors take a logical path that starts out by defining high ability students and ends with recommendations for actions that would benefit, not only students with high ability, but all students and their teachers. Along the way, the authors present elements of their own research and that of others in fields associated with gifted education and psychology. They examined the need students with high ability have for challenge; opportunities for engagement in advanced activities in the context of higher order thinking, critical and creative thinking, problem solving and decision making, transfer, and in their areas of strength and interest; how boredom and low self-efficacy relate to underachievement and other potentially devastating problems: how teachers’ self-efficacy towards teaching in general, and the teaching of productive thinking skills in particular, may impact a students own self-efficacy toward use of thinking skills; and how reduced self-efficacy in teachers toward teaching thinking skills may explain the lack of adjustment made in the curriculum for high ability students.