The Emperor Has No Clothes: The Naked Truth About the Construct Validity of Traditional Methods of Gifted Identification

ABSTRACT The field of giftedness legitimates itself on the basis of correlations of gifted-identification measures with future success that do not mean what they often are taken to mean. When one views the inadequacies of these correlations, the field turns out to be much like the emperor who had no clothes. This essay reviews some of the assumptions upon which the legitimacy of much of the field, at least in practice, bases itself, and concludes that because many assumptions are inadequate, so are certain widespread practices of the field. In particular, the fact that measures used in gifted identification predict future success, as measured by conventional societally sanctioned indices of success, does not suggest that those measures actually are complete or even adequate for gifted identification. Society needs new directions for theory, research, and practice.