Editorial

Abstract

This special issue encompasses eight papers from three different contexts: school, work, and sport. On the one hand, these three contexts are of immense practical importance. Over the last decades, they have attracted the attention of quite a few researchers interested in the development of high abilities. Given that it is easier for researchers to receive funds in these fields – among other reasons – a higher proportion of the field’s applied research is conducted across the school, work, and sport contexts. And on the other hand, from a more theoretical perspective, it is certainly attractive to work in a field with an already rich research tradition. For example, researchers can make use of an established arsenal of valid measurement instruments or can use their models and explanations as a catalyst through which to innovate alongside other interested researchers. Indeed, this new issue of High Ability Studies seems as equally interesting from both the practical and research perspectives. The first study in the school context was conducted by Mammadov, Cross, and Ward. The authors focus on the predictive role of three of the Big Five Personality Traits (conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience) on academic achievement. One interestingfindingwas that self-regulatory efficacy along with autonomous and controlled types of motivation served as mediators in these relationships. In their paper titled “The PASS to Superior Reading Performance,” Dunn, Georgiou, and Das compared children with superior reading performance to average readers. They specifically focused on the PASS processes in reading (planning, attention, simultaneous, and successive processing). Results indicate that the main difference between superior and average readers can be located in simultaneous and successive processing. In their research, Gubbels, Segers, and Verhoeven focused on how children’s intellectual profiles related to their cognitive, socio-emotional, and academic functioning. They selected three groups of gifted children: analytically-gifted, creatively-gifted, and analytically-creatively gifted, and compared how these groups and a control group differed in cognitive, socio-emotional, and academic aspects. One of the remarkable findings of the study was that a combination of high analytical and creative abilities seemed to lead to enhanced cognitive, socioemotional, and academic functioning. The last paper related to the school context focuses on attitudes about gifted education among Irish educators. The results reported by Cross, Cross, and O’Reilly are especially informative for thefield of advocacy for the needs of high-ability students in a school context. HIGH ABILITY STUDIES 2018, VOL. 29, NO. 2, 109–110 https://doi.org/10.1080/13598139.2018.1558517