ABSTRACT
Intellectually gifted children and adolescents can be classified as mildly, moderately, highly, exceptionally, or profoundly gifted. Highly gifted students are often noted for their long attention spans. Even in the early years of school, highly gifted students can be observed to use, spontaneously, skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation while their classmates engage in more age-appropriate reasoning. Many highly gifted students have strong feelings of responsibility towards their personal performances; they can, indeed, be very self-critical. Self-nomination is less frequently used than the other three forms of nomination because some teachers unfortunately view it as giving gifted students an opportunity to "boast" about their abilities. Acceleration is considered to be one of the most effective educational interventions used with gifted and talented students, and in the non-educational settings in which it is employed it is readily accepted as a practical, common sense response to a young person's unusually advanced development in a their field of talent.
