Talent Development Beyond Achievement: Socioemotional and Contextual Pathways from Potential to Talent

Background. Research on high ability has concentrated on identifying who has it and measuring what they achieve, leaving comparatively unexamined the processes by which potential actually becomes talent — or fails to. Those processes are socioemotional and contextual: they run through families, schools and peer groups, through the beliefs that teachers, parents and learners themselves hold about what talent is and who can have it, and through identification systems that determine who is ever recognised as high-ability in the first place. Because those systems and beliefs are culturally specific, the pathway from potential to talent is unevenly available, and learners in under-represented populations and under-studied regions are systematically less likely to travel it. This Research Topic examines that pathway directly, across intellectual and academic domains.Goal. To characterise the socioemotional, contextual and developmental processes through which potential becomes talent; to examine how beliefs about talent and identification practices shape who is recognised and supported; and to extend the evidence base beyond the populations and countries in which gifted-education research has predominantly been conducted.Scope. Five pillars, in this order: (1) identification practices, equity and who gets recognised, including twice-exceptional learners; (2) beliefs about talent held by learners, families, teachers and systems; (3) socioemotional development and wellbeing in high-ability learners; (4) family, school and peer contexts as enabling or constraining conditions; (5) longitudinal and cross-cultural evidence on trajectories from early potential to realised talent.Exclusions. Technology-driven and AI-based interventions for underachievement (addressed elsewhere); athletic and sporting talent development; studies whose outcome is achievement or attainment alone. Topic editors: Sheyla Blumen, Eduardo Franco, Solange Wechsler Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86192/talent-development-beyond-achievement-socioemotional-and-contextual-pathways-from-potential-to-talent