ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the field of gifted and talented education that is primarily intended for practitioners and researchers who are interested in Latino immigrant students and who may know little about the issues and questions that are central to the field. Members of the gifted and talented community may wish to skim the chapter rapidly for a sense of how outsiders make sense of their work. The chapter traces the interest in the education of gifted and talented children in the country United States. It also offers an overview of definitions of giftedness, of procedures followed in the identification of gifted children, of ways in which identification procedures discriminate against poor, minority children, and of administrative arrangements currently used in providing services to students identified as gifted. The chapter discusses a number of conceptualizations of giftedness that make evident the many remaining questions that surround the understanding of superior or exceptional human ability.
