ABSTRACT
Defensible programs for the gifted have as their primary goal the provision of curriculum designed to engage, challenge, and promote continual intellectual growth in advanced learners. In 1979, the curriculum committee of the National/State Leadership Training Institute (N/S-LTI) developed a list of some principles of a curriculum for the gifted which served for many years as the definitive criteria for what makes curriculum for gifted unique. Qualities of curriculum that were traditionally thought of as being the territory of gifted programs—emphasis on higher-level thinking skills, concept-based instruction, real world investigations—are now regarded as descriptors of an appropriate curriculum for all. Critics argued that students identified as gifted receive special learning opportunities that could benefit all students, increasing pressure on members of the field of gifted education to justify that the curriculum presented to gifted students is indeed uniquely suited to those learners and inappropriate for others.
