ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses racial/ethnic identity and gender identity and their association with outstanding performance. The relationship between gender identity and schooling was examined in recent studies. Erikson recognized the distinction between what have now become two major strands in identity research, personal identity and social identity. The chapter begins with a review of giftedness as a construct, and a review of statistics on the demographic membership of Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) programs. There are several additional conceptual models and empirical studies in the literature that suggest an association between racial/ethnic identification and academic achievement. The idea of giftedness being related to academic performance has resulted in a substantial amount of controversy in the literature, in large part due to its association with psychometric intelligence. There have been several attempts to use views about traditional gender roles to explain the discrepancy between the strong academic performance of females generally and their relatively weak performance in the STEM fields.
