Socializing Giftedness: Toward an ACCEL-S Approach

In this response, we commend Sternberg’s Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership (ACCEL) model yet urge him to consider an ACCEL-S model that more fully incorporates society’s integrative role in giftedness. ACCEL-S builds on the highly complex and contextual view of giftedness proposed by Sternberg and transforms it into a participatory framework. Within it, the skills associated with giftedness shape but are also shaped by social context; they generate meaningful forms of collaboration as well as grow out of them. The concept of giftedness itself is transformed from a person-centric one to a distributed model in which being gifted is a relational instead of purely personal achievement.     

Children and creativity: A most (un)likely pair?

This article addresses the question of whether children are or are not creative by exploring the assumptions underlying each possible answer. It is argued that our position regarding children's creativity steams from larger systems of representation concerning children on the one hand, and creativity on the other. Arguments for and against the idea that children can be creative are then considered from four different perspectives: the product, process, person and press factor. On the whole, children's creativity is accounted for in terms of a particular ‘reading’ of children as active and interactive beings and of creativity as a social and cultural phenomenon. In contrast, children's lack of creative expression is linked with a passive and receptive image of the child and with theorising creativity through the lenses of the genius and of great creations. In the end, the benefits of acknowledging children's creativity are considered for child and developmental psychology, for creativity research and for educational practices.     

The Impact of Internal Labor Markets on Newspaper Industry Personnel Practices

Media industries in the United States have consolidated significantly in the second half of the last century. One consequence of the consolidation is a restructuring of the way the industries construct and access their labor markets. As the media group integrates or even coordinates the hiring of personnel, the Internal Labor Market can be expanded to cover all or major parts of the media company. Creation of what is termed here an Extended Internal Labor Market has the potential to alter personnel practices in the group.

This article tested this expectation in one specific area, the hiring of and investment in journalists, for one type of media, the daily newspaper industry. One indicant of quality hiring is the location and employment of journalists who are members of racial or ethnic minority groups. It was predicted in this article that daily newspapers that are part of an optimally configured Extended Internal Labor Market would be more likely to hire minority journalists than other newspapers. These newspapers also were expected to be more likely to value professional development of their journalists, and to provide encouragement for their journalists to engage in both internal and external training activities.

The data are generally consistent with the hypotheses. The size of the company plays an important role in understanding the relationships.     

Effectiveness of paraeducator-supplemented individual instruction: beyond basic decoding skills

A total of 46 children in Grades 2 and 3 with low word-level skills were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups that received supplemental phonics-based reading instruction. One group received intervention October through March (21.5 hours), and one group served as a control from October through March and later received intervention March through May (17.5 hours). Paraeducators trained in a standard treatment protocol provided individual instruction for 30 min per day, 4 days per week. At the March posttest, the early treatment (ET; n = 23) group outperformed the controls (late treatment, LT; n = 20) on reading accuracy and passage fluency. Across both groups, second graders outperformed third graders on these same measures. At the 3-month follow-up, the ET group showed no evidence of decline in reading accuracy, passage fluency, or words spelled; however, 3rd-grade ET students had significantly higher spelling skills compared to 2nd graders. The LT group demonstrated significant growth during their intervention in reading accuracy and spelling, but not passage fluency. When we compared the ET and LT groups on their gains per instructional hour, we found that the ET group made significantly greater gains than the LT group across all 3 measures. The results support the value of paraeducator-supplemented reading instruction for students below grade level in word identification and reading fluency.