Despite the fact that our society prizes gifted children, research on their special talents is underfunded compared with other areas of education and suffers from a number of methodological challenges. These challenges include (but are not limited to) the fact that definitions of giftedness are not standardized, that test ceilings are often too low to measure progress or growth, that comparison groups for exceptional individuals are often difficult to find, and that participant attrition in longitudinal studies involving special populations can compromise the validity of findings more...