Enhancing Resilience of Gifted Students

Researchers and practitioners have become increasingly interested in studying resilience to understand the high performance of gifted students who encounter difficult situations or pressures as well as those students’ developmental paths and characteristics (Noble, Subotnik, & Arnold,1999). Although studies on resilience have investigated risk and protective factors that result in adaptive consequences in the presence of adversity, there is no single agreed-upon definition of resilience. Researchers have approached the concept of resilience in different ways, depending on their purposes. In any case, resilience tends to involve connections between conditions of risk and apparent competence and is referred to as an ability to make appropriate behavioral choices and achieve emotional health and social competence regardless of adversity or stress (Dole, 2000; Neihart, 1999; Reis, Colbert, & Hébert, 2004; Werner & Smith, 1982). Studies on the resilience of gifted students have tended to examine academic resilience and factors impacting academic success