Intelligence 87 (2021) 101546

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Intelligence
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/intell

The future of intelligence research and gifted education

Jonathan Wai a, *, Frank C. Worrell b, *
a
Dept. of Education Reform and Dept. of Psychology, University of Arkansas, USA
b
Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley, USA

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: This paper considers the future of intelligence research and gifted education by first examining gifted education
Gifted education through the lens of intelligence research and second by examining intelligence research through the lens of gifted
Intelligence research education. We take a historical approach to understanding the potential confluence of the two domains and also
Interdisciplinary research
consider the challenges of integrating a primarily science focused field with a primarily advocacy and applied
Educational practice
field. We conclude by acknowledging genuine challenges of integrating the two fields in the future while
simultaneously providing some recommendations on how intelligence research and gifted education might find a
scientific and pragmatic intersection with a focus on helping develop the talents of all students, and especially
those from marginalized backgrounds.

“Broadly I think there's an arc of human history that bends towards
increasing rationality and use of evidence. That can be reflected in some
periods of progress and some periods of retreat, but I think we move
forward.” (Grover J. Whitehurst, The Brookings Institution, 2018).
1. Gifted research through the lens of intelligence research
To fully appreciate the field of intelligence and its future, one must
know its scientific history. Detterman, who founded the journal Intelli­
gence, noted that early studies of intelligence had small sample sizes and
less methodological and statistical sophistication, and he thought some
of the most important areas for future research were in genetics,
neuroscience, and cognition. Detterman also noted,
If we have a better understanding of intelligence, we'll understand
many things better, from education to mental retardation to genius
and super achievement. Intelligence is humans' most important
adaptive function. It's related to everything you can think of: health,
social problems, and so many other things. (Detterman, as quoted in
Wai, 2014).
Thus, Detterman believed that the future of intelligence research was
a starting point for better understanding many other areas, including
outstanding performance and exceptional performers, which fall
squarely in the province of gifted education. Indeed, research suggests
that developed intelligence, defined as the ability to learn quickly, plays
a role in outstanding performance in almost every domain, from aca­
demics and athletics to the professions and the visual and performing
arts (Worrell, Olszewski-Kubilius, & Subotnik, 2019).
At the outset, we should be clear that the term gifted is conceptu­
alized much more broadly by gifted education scholars than simply
developed high intelligence. We use Subotnik et al.'s (2011, p. 7) defi­
nition of giftedness as “performance or production that is clearly at the
upper end of the distribution in a talent domain even relative to that of
other high-functioning individuals in that domain,” and thus we view
intelligence as one important contributor to giftedness. Given that in­
telligence has been shown to be related to numerous life outcomes, and
especially to educational performance and attainment (e.g., Brown, Wai,
& Chabris, 2021; Deary, Strand, Smith, & Fermandes, 2007), high in­
telligence serves as raw ability, and gifted education is the translation of
that raw ability into expertise or gifted performance in a domain.
From the perspective of many intelligence researchers then, the
future of intelligence research most certainly should have implications
for a field that pertains to gifted children, as almost any delineation of
giftedness should at least consider intelligence and various established
cognitive abilities (Carroll, 1993) as an important aspect of a measurable
definition (Detterman, 1993; Thompson & Oehlert, 2010; Wai, Brown, &
Chabris, 2018). In fact, longitudinal studies of intellectually talented
youths from researchers who come from the perspective of mainstream
intelligence research have already illuminated many aspects of our

* Corresponding authors.
E-mail addresses: jwai@uark.edu (J. Wai), frankc@berkeley.edu (F.C. Worrell).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2021.101546
Received 1 March 2021; Received in revised form 13 May 2021; Accepted 13 May 2021
Available online 19 May 2021
0160-2896/© 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
J. Wai and F.C. Worrell
understanding of gifted students and education that can help them (e.g.,
the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth; Lubinski & Benbow,
2000, 2006, 2021).
In addition to the large body of intelligence research that already has
accumulated across the decades and should be incorporated into gifted
education research, given that these findings are well replicated and
generalizable (for summaries see Deary, 2020; Haier, 2016; Hunt, 2010;
Lubinski, 2004), there are many newer ideas and advances from the field
of intelligence research that continue to be investigated. These include
the role of education in improving intelligence (Ceci, 1991; Ritchie &
Tucker-Drob, 2018), how research in behavioral genetics might be
connected to education (e.g., Asbury & Wai, 2020; Malanchini, Rimfeld,
Allegrini, Ritchie, & Plomin, 2020), the different theoretical models of
cognitive abilities (Kovacs & Conway, 2019), the challenges involved in
getting artificial intelligence agents to mimic human intelligence
(Kunda, 2020), and the role of sensitive periods in cognitive develop­
ment (Kievit, 2020).
All these, and additional future advances in intelligence research
should be incorporated into gifted education research if the gifted ed­
ucation field hopes to be at the “cutting edge” of the educational and
psychological sciences focused on empirical evidence (e.g., Lubinski &
Benbow, 2021; Subotnik et al., 2011). However, given that gifted edu­
cation researchers are small in number (roughly 7% of the National
Association for Gifted Children; Knudsen, personal communication)
relative to their—mostly practitioner—counterparts, and that much of
the field is focused on advocacy and practice (Gallagher, 2002; Rob­
inson, 2020; VanTassel-Baska, 2018) rather than scientific research, it is
unclear whether future findings from the field of intelligence will be
incorporated into the research on gifted education. Another difference is
that intelligence as a research field is highly multidisciplinary drawing
from literatures in many fields, whereas gifted education as a research
field is relatively more discipline focused and perhaps more insular (e.g.,
Ambrose et al., 2010).
Intelligence researchers mostly focus on the science and leave it to
those in practice to use the information; however, effective communi­
cation of scientific findings from intelligence needs to account for
challenges well beyond the intelligence research community (e.g., see
Wai, 2020, for a review of the communication challenges of intelligence
research and suggestions for improved communication).
2. Intelligence research through the lens of gifted education
As evident in the histories of education reform (Loveless, 2021;
Tyack & Cuban, 1995) and gifted education (Jolly, 2018) intelligence
has always had a complicated relationship with gifted education,
particularly within the U.S. (Maranto & Wai, 2020). Thus, we ask here
whether there is a way to reconcile the largely empirical perspective of
intelligence research and the less-empirical approach of much of gifted
education (which includes both research and practice). We note that,
there has been some push for what works in education, and a segment of
the education research field is focused on RCTs and other tools for causal
inference (Singer, 2019), but these findings continue to be disconnected
from much educational practice. Thus, the construct-validity approach
of intelligence researchers may not be fully resolvable with many
research fields in education and especially in educational policy and
practice (Bogenschneider & Corbett, 2010) which are also concerned
with consequential validity. Consequential validity brings values and
politics into education research (Greene & McShane, 2018; Loveless,
2021), and, historically, these concerns have come into conflict with
various implications of some conclusions drawn from intelligence
research (Martschenko, Trejo, & Domingue, 2019; Rindermann, Becker,
& Coyle, 2020).
Many gifted education researchers do not agree that intelligence
should be central to what it means to be gifted and gifted education
practitioners and policymakers may not like the possible implications of
what some aspects of intelligence research might suggest. Thus, in 10,
2
Intelligence 87 (2021) 101546
20, or 30 plus years into the future, a more realistic view might indicate
that there may be little integration of intelligence and educational
research if history is our guide (Maranto & Wai, 2020), and perhaps a
widening gulf between research findings in the field of intelligence and
findings in gifted and broader education research and practice.
3. A path forward for the future of intelligence research and
gifted education
However, we propose here that there are ideas and aspects from
intelligence research that may be more likely to be accepted by the
research, practice, and policy communities in gifted education, which
are often focused on how to improve the outcomes of children, or on
what is malleable. Given the ongoing structural and systemic racism in
U.S. society and numerous challenges of identifying and supporting
students from low income and historically disadvantaged backgrounds
in gifted education (Wai & Worrell, 2020), it is crucial in our view that
intelligence researchers continue to explore and be open to findings that
are currently established, as well as to think more about how variables
other than intelligence may play an important role in life outcomes. As
Hunt (2009, p. 23) noted,
There is excellent psychological research showing that people often
attribute success and failure to the person when situational con­
straints are dictating results. I suspect that intelligence researchers
tend to undervalue situational determinants, because we fixate on a
personal trait, intelligence. We ought to spend some time investi­
gating situations where intelligence measures fail to predict success.
Just as gifted education researchers focus on their own discipline as
their point of reference, intelligence researchers do the same, as does
each academic subfield (Wai, 2020).
Factors such as luck and providing opportunities (Frank, 2016; Plu­
chino, Biondo, & Rapisarda, 2018; Subotnik et al., 2011), for example,
matter much more than we are able to measure and account for in our
models. And more broadly, a paradigm broadening beyond the standard
approach within the field of intelligence research would be greatly
beneficial to the field as it seeks to be more relevant to other academic
fields and to policy and practice (e.g., Kovacs & Conway, 2019; Singer,
2019). Even the “Aims and Scope” statement on the website of the
journal, Intelligence, notes that application is secondary to contributions
to basic knowledge: “In general, studies concerned with application will
not be considered appropriate unless the work also makes a contribution
to basic knowledge” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/intellige
nce/about/aims-and-scope). It is certainly appropriate to focus on
publishing contributions to basic knowledge primarily, but this focus
also means that issues relating to application and practice, which can
inform the way questions of basic science in intelligence are asked and
explored—and perhaps result in better integration of research into
policy and practice—are simply left out. Might the future of intelligence
research be fruitfully guided by not only advances in basic science but
also a broader understanding of how practitioners and others focused on
application might already use intelligence, or seek to use it if they
recognized the current weight of the evidence? In this vein, we now
present a couple snippets from intelligence research that may be more
likely to be used by those in gifted education and policy based on our
understanding of the broader social and historical context.
Belsky et al.’s (2018) work suggests that in some contexts, genetic
effects on outcomes may be higher for higher SES families. In other
words, the contribution of cognitive and noncognitive factors to per­
formance outcomes varies based on the environment and the social and
material resources provided (Belsky et al., 2018). Additionally, Detter­
man (1993) noted that heritability may differ across ability levels and
that environmental influences may be greater for gifted students at
higher ability levels. The path to W. E. Du Bois becoming the first African
American to receive a PhD from Harvard was based not only on Du Bois'
J. Wai and F.C. Worrell
cognitive abilities evident from childhood but also on the opportunities
provided and propitious sociohistorical chance events (Worrell, 2014).
Viewing cognitive abilities not only as contributors to educational
outcomes but also as the products of education (e.g., Kievit, 2020; Loh­
man, 1993, 2005; Snow, 1996) can help us investigate in greater detail
what the factors are that might allow us to enhance intelligence through
education or other means (Ceci, 1991; Ritchie & Tucker-Drob, 2018).
For example, gifted students who have parents with resources may
experience tailwinds (Stevens, 2020) that add up to a cumulative
advantage over time (e.g., Dannefer, 2003; Merton, 1968; Wai & Wor­
rell, 2020). This advantage, which may be in part due to opportunity
gaps, serves to widen the achievement and eventual educational and
occupational attainment gaps over time. Similarly, there may be head­
winds (Stevens, 2020), which include institutional racism and other
interconnected forces that cumulatively add up to a series of disadvan­
tages (e.g., see Mendoza-Denton, 2014, for a review of factors from so­
cial psychology that are worthy of being explored), which may operate
as a reverse Flynn (2007) effect for marginalized and low income
groups. Just as with the Flynn effect, there may be a package of factors
operating in different measure for different groups along the lines of
these headwinds and tailwinds, and more thinking and empiricism along
these lines may be helpful in eventually finding solutions that effectively
translate giftedness as raw ability more fruitfully into giftedness as
contribution (Subotnik et al., 2011), especially for talented students
from disadvantaged backgrounds.
4. Conclusion
The concept of a positive educational dosage has been shown to
enhance the talent development of gifted students (Wai, Lubinski,
Benbow, & Steiger, 2010), but a lack of stimulating educational expe­
riences and even a negative educational dosage may have the opposite
effect. Gifted students from disadvantaged and marginalized back­
grounds may have experienced negative events so often that their self-
confidence and motivation to try may be significantly diminished rela­
tive to their more advantaged counterparts, thus removing hope (Dix­
son, Keltner, Worrell, & Mello, 2017; Obama, 2008) and the belief that
they have the chance to succeed (Zigler & Styfco, 2002). Both fields need
to engage for a more productive future. Intelligence researchers need to
spend more time thinking about how their findings can ultimately
improve the lives of gifted children by focusing on those areas of intel­
ligence research that may hold more promising messages for education.
At the same time, gifted education as a field needs to consider how
research findings from the intelligence field can be fully integrated into
the field and contribute to evidence-based solutions to help gifted chil­
dren. As Whitehurst (The Brookings Institution, 2018) has observed, the
arc of human history bends towards the use of evidence and rationality,
and we have a similar hope for the integration of intelligence and gifted
education.
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