Small but Growing: A Content Analysis of the Literature Base for twice-exceptional gifted learners

Scientific

At the junction of gifted education and special education, “twice-exceptional” has been in use for over 30 years, yet it is not clear to what extent the term is recognized in the broader literature base. Through a Content Analysis methodology, “twice-exceptional” was examined for publication year, fields, focus of the article, and the country of origin of the article. “Twice-exceptional” or “2e and gifted” was mentioned in 2,659 peer-reviewed articles, while other areas of exceptionality were cited anywhere from 20- 400 times more often. The authors found that there were numerous duplicates, making only 1803 usable original articles. Of the 142 randomly selected articles, only 100 were focused centrally on twice-exceptional issues. Of the 100 articles, 12% were in gifted education journals and seven authors accounted for 20% of the articles. There was a significant interest in international journals and most research conducted was in the nature of dissertations.