ABSTRACT
The term gifted is notably missing and the term talented is substituted in the opening phrases of the definition provided in the recent National Excellence document which begins, "Children and youth with outstanding talent". The reasons behind the trend away from the use of gifted or the phrase gifted and talented toward the use of the term talented may reflect negative social, cultural, and/or political factors. In H. Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences, he explicitly rejected giving more weight to the constructs people have traditionally associated with intelligence, and using either the term talent or gift. F. Gagne criticized these distinctions with the assertion that there is "no apparent difference", except that giftedness appears to subsume talents. The areas identified as talent areas are then specified as those in which these individuals "exhibit high performance capability in intellectual, creative and/or artistic areas, possess unusual leadership capacity, or excel in specific academic fields".
