In this article, I review ideas about creativity and its assessment. I open with some general remarks on the nature of creativity. Then I present the investment theory of creativity. Then I describe prompts my colleagues and I have used to measure creativity. Next I describe some of the assessments we have used to measure creativity. The ultimate goal is that assessments such as those described in this article eventually will make their way into standardized tests of abilities, talents, and skills.

Serious identification of the gifted started with the work of Lewis Terman early in the 20th century. Terman’s model, based largely on IQ, may have made sense in the early 20th century, but it no longer makes sense today. The problems that society needs its gifted individuals to solve in the 21st century require much more than IQ—in addition to analytical, IQ-like skills, they also require creative, practical, wisdom-based, and ethical skills. In this essay, I discuss some of the background for the conventional IQ-based model of gifted identification and education and then consider the problems the world faces today and why IQ is insufficient to solve them. I then present a new model—ACCEL (Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership)—that perhaps will better prepare our gifted students for the world of the future.

Intelligence typically is defined as consisting of “adaptation to the environment” or in related terms. Yet, it is not clear that “general intelligence” or g, traditionally conceptualized in terms of a general factor in a psychometrically-based hierarchical model of intelligence, provides an optimal way of defining intelligence as adaptation to the environment. Such a definition of adaptive intelligence would need to be biologically based in terms of evolutionary theory, would need to take into account the cultural context of adaptation, and would need to take into account whether thought and behavior labeled as “adaptively intelligent” actually contributed to the perpetuation of the human and other species, or whether it was indifferent or actually destructive to this perpetuation. In this article, I consider the similarities and differences between “general intelligence” and “adaptive intelligence,” as well as the implications especially of the differences.

In this article, I discuss two kinds of giftedness, transactional and transformational. Transformational giftedness is giftedness that is transformative. Transformationally gifted individuals seek positively to change the world at some level—in their own way, to make the world a better place. Transactional giftedness is giftedness that is based on exchange. It is tit-for-tat in nature. The individual is identified as gifted and then expects and is expected to do something in return. That something, for children, is typically high-level performance in academic coursework. Society also may expect that the individual later in life will continue to show high educational achievement. The two kinds of giftedness are not inborn. Rather, they are shaped through life in school and in the home interacting with the personal attitudes toward life of the gifted individual.

Intelligence is the ability to learn from experience and to adapt to, shape, and select environments. Intelligence as measured by (raw scores on) conventional standardized tests varies across the lifespan, and also across generations. Intelligence can be understood in part in terms of the biology of …