Dr. Gross is a leading international authority on the education of gifted and talented children, particularly in the areas of ability grouping, acceleration, socio-affective development, and the highly gifted.

Miraca has won several international research awards. In 1987 she became the first non-American to win the Hollingworth Award for Excellence in Research in Gifted Education. In 1988 and 1990 she was awarded Mensa International Education and Research Foundation Awards for Excellence. In 1995 the American National Association for Gifted Children honored her with their Early Scholar Award and in 2005 with their Distinguished Scholar Award--the first person outside North America to be so honored. She is a regular keynote and invited presenter at international educational conferences.

Miraca's research areas can be viewed as separate or interlinked. For example, her 23-year longitudinal study, which traces the childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood of 60 exceptionally gifted young people, monitored the short-term and long-term educational, social, and emotional outcomes of several forms of acceleration--and also the social difficulties which can arise when highly gifted children are retained with age-peers with whom they have little or nothing in common (Exceptionally Gifted Children, 2004). In 2002 Miraca completed, for the John Templeton Foundation of Pennsylvania, a major synthesis of the international research on radical acceleration and early college entrance, examining familial, academic, and socio-affective correlates. More recently, with a further Templeton grant, she was co-author with Nicholas Colangelo and Susan Assouline of A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students. In 2003, Miraca was awarded the Sir Harold Wyndham Medal for service to Australian Education.

Henshon: What led you to the field of gifted education?
Gross: Basically I was led to gifted education by my own experience as a child and then, later, as an elementary-school teacher. I was born and brought up in Scotland and, although the Scottish education system in the 1950s was very rigorous, everything was taught in a lockstep manner. As with many gifted students, the pace of the work was much too slow for my learning needs and learning style and most of my time was spent waiting for the others to catch up. I was very bored and frustrated; I was passionate about learning and I wasn't being allowed to learn. In addition, I was very lonely and socially isolated because I had no real friends--I didn't have much in common with the other kids, and they thought I was a nerd and pretty much avoided me.

But I had one magical teacher in primary school. Her name was Miss Kay. I entered school a few weeks before my fifth birthday (as was normal in Scotland at that time) but I was already a fluent reader and Miss Kay just quietly accepted this and put me on an individualized reading program. But I became so entranced watching her teach the other kids to read that I hardly read the books she gave me--I just watched her and listened in awe and delight. She was the most inspiring teacher and I was fascinated by the teaching techniques she was using. I could see the excitement of the other kids as they started to master reading. And I decided in those early months that, one day, I too would be a teacher and I would help other children to experience the sheer joy in reading that Miss Kay was inspiring in my classmates. And that is why I became a teacher.

Another huge influence on my education came at the end of elementary school when I was accepted into an selective secondary (8th-12th grade) school for academically gifted students. I remember feeling, in the first week, that here…now was when my life was really beginning. This was Boroughmuir School in Edinburgh, a school in the state education system--and, unusually for the time, the teachers were specially selected as well as the students. And in that amazing school I made friends for the first time--lifelong friends among both the students and the teachers. My experiences there made me keenly aware of the sustained academic and social benefits of ability grouping. It changed my own life profoundly.

I trained as a teacher and taught for a couple of years in Edinburgh, and when I was 23 I emigrated to Australia. A few years later I was posted to Clapham Primary School (elementary school, in American terms) in Adelaide, South Australia where, by coincidence, the Principal, Alf Pearce, had a special interest in gifted education. He believed that academically gifted children were among the most disadvantaged students in Australian schools and he established self-contained classes, cluster grouped classes, and specific subject grouping. He was light years ahead of most Australian principals, at that time, in his thinking about gifted education. For 6 consecutive years I taught gifted students in various forms of special program and I became absolutely committed to the field. In 1978, with some South Australian teacher colleagues, I founded Australia's first ever State Association for Gifted Children.

Then in 1985 the South Australian Education Department gave me a wonderful gift that changed my life. In those days no Australian university offered a master's degree in gifted education but the SAED gave me a full salaried scholarship to do my Masters at Purdue with a man who became an inspirational friend and mentor--Dr. John Feldhusen. Doing this study meant that I had to live in the USA for a time, but my wonderful husband, John Gross, who is the other great gift that life has given me, supported me to the hilt every inch and every day of the way. The master's degree led on to a Purdue PhD in gifted education and a very short time after that, on my return to Australia, I was appointed to the education faculty at the University of Melbourne-the first ever Australian university faculty appointment made specifically in the field of gifted education. Two years after that I moved to the University of New South Wales where I established the Gifted Education Research, Resource and Information Centre (GERRIC) of which I am Director.

Henshon: What were the most important lessons that you learned?
Gross: One of the most disturbing lessons I learned in gifted education, fight from my early years in the field, is that there is an enormous gap between what research has shown about the interventions that work with gifted students and what most teachers believe. A huge mythology has grown up about the imagined ill-effects of ability grouping and acceleration on gifted students' academic and social development, and it truly seems to be hydra-headed because as soon as one myth is dispelled another rises up. Camilla Benbow and Julian Stanley pointed out in 1996, in a brilliant article in the Journal of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law that the field of education in general is plagued by fads and fallacies, and sadly it seems that gifted education is no exception.

I've become a passionate advocate of above-level testing with academically gifted students. So often this is the only way to assess these students' true levels of aptitude or achievement. If we can't do that reliably, how can we program appropriately for the students? An additional problem with using tests normed on students' chronological ages is that when they score at, or close to, the ceiling of the test there is no way of measuring growth. How can we evaluate the academic effects of educational interventions if the tests we use can't measure gains in achievement?

An additional problem is the use of tests with low ceilings to assess affective variables. For example, if we are looking to measure shifts in self-concept or self-esteem as a function of participation in gifted programs through a repeated measures design, using a self-concept or self-esteem test which previous studies have shown to have a ceiling effect with gifted students is pointless. We may even get a regression towards, the mean effect on the second or third assessment which could suggest that the students' self-esteem had itself decreased, where, in fact, there is no decrease and even a possible gain.

Henshon: If you had to name individuals both in the field and maybe even outside the field who have had the greatest effect on your thinking, who would they be? Gross: Julian Stanley has had a profound effect on my thinking. He was such a visionary but he was also a scholar of great intellectual integrity who, as a researcher, dotted every i and crossed every t. He taught me that passion must be balanced with precision. I deeply admire the work of Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski who are carrying forward the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. The great Leta Hollingworth, who died before I was born, has been an enormous inspiration for her documenting of the intellectual and emotional lives of gifted students; it was her work that inspired my own interest in exceptionally and profoundly gifted children. Then, of course, there are Nicholas Colangelo and Susan Assouline for their work on socio-affective development and counseling, and for two inspirational years writing A Nation Deceived; Nancy Robinson for her work in early childhood giftedness and also early entrance to university; Joyce VanTassel-Baska's contributions to curriculum development and program design; Karen Rogers' meta-analyses of studies on acceleration and ability grouping; Françoys Gagné for his DMGT Model which provides such a wonderful framework for understanding the influence of personalogical and environmental variables on talent development; and John Feldhusen and Bill Asher who at Purdue gave me such a solid and rigorous foundation on which to build my own knowledge and study of the field.

In Australia I want to honor the courage and determination of some of our pioneers in gifted education. I think particularly of Professor Brian Start, formerly of the University of Melbourne, and the amazing people, such as Ann Belmont, Sue Kirsten, Janet Farrell, Ann Matison, and so many others with whom I was privileged to work in the early years of the Gifted and Talented Children's Association of South Australia. It is difficult for Australians today to conceive of the malevolence--the active and ongoing spite and ill-wishing--that was leveled during: the 1970s and 1980s at people who advocated for gifted education--and the courage that was needed to carry on.

Henshon: What other areas have held your interest over the years and how have they evolved?
Gross: I absolutely love teaching. I believe it is both an art and a science and I take a keen pleasure in continually and actively studying and working to develop my teaching skills. Some of the teachers at Boroughmuir were quite remarkable people who could inspire students to a real passion for their subject. The most gifted teacher I have ever encountered was Joe Casciani who taught me English at Boroughmuir--another colleague who became a personal friend and who modeled a wonderful synthesis of scholarship and teaching skill. His contagious enthusiasm made our minds sing with the love of learning. I've tried to model my teaching on Joe for his passion and teaching skill and on Miss Kay for her awareness and profound response to individual differences. In 1995, the University of New South Wales honored me with a Vice-Chancellor (President's) award for teaching and 2 years later the Australian Federal Government honored me with its inaugural award for university teaching in education. I owe that to Miss Kay, Joe Casciani, and the others who inspired me.

My other hobbies and interests--well, I read ardently and widely. I have a deep interest in Scottish history. I absolutely love contract bridge and play as often as I can--at least twice a week. John and I enjoy playing in local and national bridge tournaments. We have also been owned by a series of cats, over the years, who have brought us great joy. (It's interesting to note how many of my friends in gifted education are cat lovers; maybe someone should do a study on this!) When I was at the Wallace Symposium at the University of Iowa earlier this year I found a cute t-shirt that says: "Books and cats: Life is sweet" and I thought, "Yes, that says it."

Henshon: What is some of the research that you're working on currently?
Gross: One of the things I'm currently working on is a synthesis of findings from some of the major longitudinal studies in gifted education such as those of Terman, Hollingworth, SMPY, Bloom, the Fullerton Study, and my own study of exceptionally and profoundly gifted children. Something that is coming out very strongly is that researchers' findings regarding gifted children's cognitive, affective, and even sensorimotor development are surprisingly similar given the studies' different eras and settings; however, findings regarding schools' educational response to academic giftedness note very significant differences across eras. School systems try to tell us that over the last few decades there has been an enhanced awareness of individual differences in children but if that is so, it certainly doesn't seem to have been translated into an enhanced flexibility in schools' response! Look at the disturbing underusage of acceleration in the present day, for example. Twenty percent of Terman's subjects were permitted to skip all or part of first grade, and by the time they graduated from high school, 10% had skipped two grades and a further 23% had skipped one. Fully one third of these students were grade-advanced. Compare that with what is happening now!

In recent years I've developed a keen interest in how intellectually gifted children perceive friendship. We've known for some time that children's conceptions of friendship form a developmental hierarchy of age-related stages with expectations of friendship, and beliefs about friendship, becoming more sophisticated and complex with age. Through an empirical study of average ability, moderately and exceptionally gifted children, and young adolescents, I've found that gifted students pass through the stages of friendship conception significantly earlier and, indeed, faster, than average ability age-peers. Some exceptionally gifted girls aged 6 and 7 in this study were already displaying conceptions of friendship which do not develop in children of average ability until age 11 or 12. These children were looking for relationships of trust, fidelity, and unconditional acceptance at ages when their classmates were still seeing a "friend" as someone to play with.

The findings of this study may help to explain why so many research studies over the last 70 years have found that intellectually gifted children tend to gravitate towards older children or other gifted children of approximately their own age. As well as seeking intellectual stimulation and social acceptance, they may be seeking other children who are looking for the same things in friendship.

GERRIC has recently received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to investigate the causes of the underutilization of acceleration with gifted students in Australia. This study is very strongly grounded in the research that Nick Susan, and I did for the Templeton-funded A Nation Deceived and, indeed, on an earlier grant from Templeton which GERRIC received in 2001 to produce an annotated bibliography of the international research on radical acceleration. It will be fascinating to explore the similarities and differences between American and Australian teacher and community attitudes towards acceleration.

Henshon: Can you share some insights you've attained over your own longitudinal study?
Gross: My longitudinal study of 60 Australian young people of IQ 160 (who appear in the population at ratios of fewer than 1 in 10,000) is now in its 23rd year and the young people are in their late twenties and early thirties. Throughout the study I've been tracing aspects of their academic, social, and emotional development. I've found significant differences in the young people's educational status, the fields they've entered, their degrees of life satisfaction, their social relationships and their self-esteem as a function of the degree of academic acceleration their schools permitted them in childhood and adolescence. The considerable majority of the young people who have been accelerated by 2 or more years report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading Australian and international universities, have successful professional careers and enjoy happy and productive social and love relationships. By contrast, young people of equal abilities who have accelerated by only 1 year, or who have not been permitted any form of acceleration, have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report much lower levels of life satisfaction and, in many cases, experience significant or even quite extreme difficulties with socialization. Several dropped out of college or high school.

Many of these students believe that their problems with socialization stem directly from the years of social rejection they experienced in primary and elementary school with no one who shared their abilities or interests or who could even begin to understand the way they thought and felt. If you don't have the opportunity in your early years to develop friendship-building skills, it's not surprising if you don't develop the confidence to seek our friendships in later years. Many of these young people were "taught" to believe that they were socially unacceptable.

The way I see it, retaining children of IQ 160+ in the mixed-ability classroom where the average IQ is 100, is rather like conducting an educational experiment in which we take a child of average intellectual ability, place him in a class of children with severe intellectual disabilities--children whose IQs are at least four standard deviations below his--keep him there for the duration of his schooling and observe over this period what happens to his academic, social, and emotional development. Fortunately no education system would conduct such an experiment and no university ethics committee in Australia or the USA would condone it.

Interestingly, most of the young people who were permitted significant degrees of acceleration were what their teachers would probably call "well-rounded." They are exceptionally and profoundly gifted but, as well as their passion for their particular talent areas, they were also able, in their school years, to develop a range of interests which are socially acceptable within the Australian culture. They tend to be musically talented but even more importantly, they tend to be talented in sport. Perhaps they were "forgiven" for being intellectually gifted because they displayed a range of interests that their classmates and teachers could readily relate to and feel comfortable with. Perhaps their schools also felt that these indications of "normality" would reduce the risk of them being harmed by acceleration?

When I started to plan my own longitudinal study I was very influenced by the Terman and Hollingworth studies, in terms of the sheer breadth of their investigations. Terman's team, in particular, explored the lives of his subjects, and their families, in quite remarkable detail. One of things he reported in the earlier volumes of his study was his families' involvement in charity and community organizations--often charities which support children with special needs or or families in difficulties--to which they gave voluntary service, often over many years and often as unpaid administrators. In later volumes he recounted how, when the children themselves grew up, many of them continued this 'tradition' of service. In 1993, in the first edition of Exceptionally Gifted Children, I recounted how many of the parents and grandparents of the young people in my study have likewise become involved in service clubs and charity organizations. Because of the talent for organization and administration which many of them possess, they tend to occupy leadership positions in these clubs or organizations and spend much of their free time in voluntary and unpaid service. Many of them are involved in organizations which support children with intellectual or physical disabilities. This stands in striking contrast to the stereotyped perception of parents of the gifted as overambitious and selfish individuals whose only concern is to promote the interests of their own children!

I have watched with pleasure over the last few years as many of the young people in my study have likewise become involved in these and other organizations, volunteering many hours of their spare time in voluntary service. One of the young lads in my study had, by the time he was 14, created a library service for elderly and housebound people in his neighborhood.

Henshon: What kinds of work do you see yourself working on in the near future?
Gross: Well, GERRIC, the Centre I run, has three main "arms": research, teaching, and service. Obviously, research is enormously important. However, the School of Education, in which I am a professor, also has a very intensive teaching program in gifted education with six Master of Education courses and, at the undergraduate level, a course which is taken by all students in our BA/BEd or BSc/BEd teacher training program--more than 200 annually. This means that all trainee teachers graduate with a solid introduction in how to identify and respond to gifted students in the schools they will be going into. Additionally GERRIC runs, annually, a very successful postgraduate Certificate of Gifted Education which consists of 80 contact hours of lectures and seminars and runs during the Southern Hemisphere school vacation so it attracts teachers from all over Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. And the service "arm" of the center is extremely active with a range of five school vacation programs for gifted and talented students from preschool through to twelfth grade. We have more than 2,000 gifted students on campus each year. We also travel all over Australia running teacher professional development programs and inservice courses for several state education systems.

In 2004, GERRIC won a large grant from the Australian Federal Government to develop a Professional Development Program in Gifted Education for teachers and administrators in Australian schools, and I've had the exciting and rewarding experience of leading a team of six colleagues in writing this program. The Core (Foundation) modules of this were sent into every school in Australia during 2005 in book form and also as interactive CD-ROMs. The Extension and Specialization levels of the course will go into schools within the next few weeks. The program, while very practical and teacher-friendly, is very strongly grounded in international and Australian research in gifted education. There has been an enormous amount of teacher interest in the program and the feedback we're receiving from the various state education systems suggests that it really is beginning to change the ways in which teachers are looking at gifted children and their learning needs. Last year and this year, my writing colleagues and I have spent a considerable amount of time traveling round the country advising and working with schools and districts on the use of the program and I anticipate that this will be ongoing for quite a while.

In addition GERRIC presently has a second government grant to develop and present a series of 50 one-day Workshops for parents of gifted children in regional and remote areas of Australia, and this has been immensely rewarding. Australia is a nation of only 20 million people in a landmass the size of the US and it's difficult for Americans to imagine the "tyranny of distance" some Australians live under. Being able to serve some of our remote communities like this is truly inspiring. I still don't like tiny airplanes, though!

In terms of research, my ongoing longitudinal study is quite engrossing, of course, and the acceleration study I mentioned earlier is going to be very exciting indeed. My life is very full but I feel I am just so blessed to have the wonderful opportunity to contribute to the field in my three areas of passion--teaching, research, and service.

Henshon: As a scholar, what have you learned that you wish you knew as a teacher?
Gross: When I was a young woman studying to become a teacher, no one mentioned gifted and talented students. Not once. Not in one lecture. And when no one mentions something, it's easy to get the idea that the thing that is left unmentioned is something that should not be mentioned--a kind of "no go" area. As a result, in my first few years of teaching, I missed, and lost the opportunity to serve, children that with hindsight I now know were very probably gifted. I had been given no guidance or help in how to identify them.

Henshon: What are some areas within the field that you think may have been misinterpreted as far as the research goes? Gross: I don't think we know nearly as much as we should about the short-term and long-term academic and social-emotional effects of ability grouping. It's sometimes suggested that when a gifted student who has been accustomed to scoring at or close to the top of a mixed-ability class--a big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE), as Herbert Marsh describes it--is placed in an ability grouped or accelerated program, he or she will suffer a loss of self-esteem, self-concept, or both through no longer being the brightest and/or most successful kid in the class.

I think this takes a rather simplistic view of giftedness and gifted students. Many gifted students are caught in a "forced-choice dilemma" where they feel they have to make a choice between academic achievement and social acceptance--and many choose social acceptance. There is a wealth of research that shows us that dumbing down for peer acceptance is endemic in academically gifted students placed in the regular classroom. Being the "big fish" in a mixed-ability pond may be more rewarding, vicariously, to the gifted child's parents than it is to the child herself!

Some years ago I received an Australian Research Council grant to follow a group of gifted students who had just moved from what we call primary schools (serving Kindergarten to sixth grade) into high schools (7th through 12th grade). Some of the secondary schools were selective high schools--state-run high schools for academically gifted students; others were comprehensive (mixed-ability) high schools. There were more than 1,000 students in the study.

I tested the students' self-esteem on three occasions; at the start of the school year, 6-8 weeks later, and around the middle of the school year. The academic self-esteem of both the selective and comprehensive students declined over the first half of the year. At first glance, this decline in academic self-esteem for the gifted students could possibly be attributed to the BFLPE--these students were moving from mixed-ability classes where they had been academic leaders into ability grouped classes where only a few could be academic leaders! However, it is difficult to attribute the comprehensive high-school students' dip in academic self-esteem to the BFLPE as they were moving from one mixed-ability setting to another; it is unlikely that their class ranking changed significantly.

So, what was common to both groups which could account for the decrease in academic self-esteem? I believe that it was the experience of moving from relatively small primary schools where they had been the senior students--more academically knowledgeable and successful than the younger students, and looked up to and admired by them--to secondary schools which were in some cases three or more times larger than their primary schools, and where they were now the youngest and least experienced students, and very much at the foot of the pecking order! Add to that the dip in academic self-esteem which frequently accompanies adolescence, and I think we have a more plausible and natural explanation for the academic self-esteem dip which was common to both groups of students, mixed-ability and gifted, than simply the composition of the class they had entered. Interestingly, students in the selective high school still scored higher than their comprehensive high-school-age peers in academic self-esteem and, indeed, on all other aspects of self-esteem assessed during the study including social, general, and family self-esteem.

Interestingly, the group of gifted students who scored most highly on all aspects of self-esteem at all times during the study were selective students who were telescoping the first 2 years of high school into 1--a combination of ability grouping and acceleration! I found that ironic--that two interventions which are sometimes criticized for lowering self-esteem actually enhanced it when they were used in combination!

This study also measured students' motivational orientation, and significant differences were noted between students in selective and comprehensive high schools with the selective students being considerably more task-involved than their age-peers in regular schooling. Students in selective high schools seem more likely to be powered by "learning goals"--the desire to increase one's competence, to understand or master something new--than "performance goals"--the desire to seek out external, favorable judgment of their abilities or to avoid unfavorable judgment. Certainly they are competitive--competition is very much a part of Australian, as of American, culture--but they are oriented towards competing against themselves, wanting to improve their own understanding or mastery, rather than towards competing against, and doing better than, their classmates.

I don't see much harm in allowing gifted students to compare themselves against other students of similar abilities, even if it results in a temporary--or even longer lived--dip in academic self-esteem. Gifted students who have no opportunity to compare themselves with ability peers can develop an unrealistically inflated academic self-esteem. When will these students be confronted with reality? At university? Or out in the workforce? Isn't it better to allow these students to develop more realistic self-perceptions when they are with us in schools and we are able to assist them?

Henshon: What are some of the future developments you hope to see in the field?
Gross: I'd like to see some more longitudinal studies which look at long-term outcomes of special programs. We know how Terman's subjects who were accelerated felt in adulthood about their acceleration--very positive indeed. What do adults feel about their former participation, as students, in various forms of ability grouping? How have the programs affected different aspects of their adult life and do their perceptions on this change throughout adulthood? How does participation in a special program affect what one wants for one's own children? There is so much that needs to be investigated.

Henshon: Miraca, thanks for talking with us.
Gross: I've enjoyed it. And I'd like to close with my own thanks to Miss Kay, Joe Casciani, Alf Pearce, and John Feldhusen, gifted teachers who molded me to become a teacher of the gifted; and to my husband, John, whose love and support are the greatest gift of all.

By Suzanna E. Henshon
Dr. Suzanna E. Henshon graduated from the College of William & Mary in 2005, and now teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University. Her first novel for gifted readers, Mildew on the Wall, was published by Royal Fireworks Publishing Company in 2004.

Permission Statement:
Henshon, S. (2007, Winter). International High Ability Adventures: An Interview with Miraca Gross. Roeper Review , 29(2), 77-82.
Reprinted with permission, Roeper Review

This article is provided as a service of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a 501(c)3 nonprofit operating foundation, which nurtures and supports profoundly intelligent young people and to provide opportunities for them to develop their talents and to make a positive difference. For more information, please visit http://www.davidson-institute.org, or call (775) 852-3483.

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