Advocating Talent Development And Impactful Research
A key imperative for the 21st century lies in developing talented individuals to tackle social and scientific problems, and determining appropriate opportunities to transform abilities into expertise for high-level scholarly productivity or artistry, Professor Rena F. Subotnik shared at the NIE Higher Degrees Distinguished Lecture on “Talent Development Toward Creative Eminence In The 21st Century”. Professor Subotnik is with the Education Directorate and Director, Center for Psychology in the Schools and Education at the American Psychological Association, and she was at NIE to provide critical reflections on developing creativity and talent, and doing meaningful and impactful research at the NIE Higher Degrees Distinguished Speaker Series from 10 to 12 January 2018.
The NIE Higher Degrees Distinguished Speaker Series 2018 kicked off with a seminar that answered the question, “What can we learn from performance domains to enhance the likelihood that talent develops in STEM fields?’’ Professor Subotnik presented interesting research on multi year students studying science and classical music that highlighted the differences between audition selection versus science testing, explicit versus no explicit psycho social skills teaching and other important applications from the psychology of high performance to academic domains.
Her second seminar on “Nurturing Young Talents” provided new insights for identifying talent in the domain areas and highlighted the variation involved in some domains as to when abilities can be identified and nurtured, particularly in young children. In a seminar with doctoral students from NIE’s EdD and PhD programmes on “Doing Meaningful And Impactful Research,” she shared valuable strategies with beginning educational researchers. She highlighted how randomized controlled trials (RCTs) can be designed and implemented with qualitative methods to analyze policy and research implications and get the most “bang” for all the hard work that goes into developing an RCT.
Among a panel of NIE senior educators, Professor Subotnik led a rich discussion entitled, “Attracting, Developing And Retaining Academic Talent In Higher Education”. In the context of universities across the world becoming increasingly drawn into global ranking tables in higher education, NIE senior educators were invited to discuss what NIE could do to attract, develop and retain talented academics and researchers.
The NIE community appreciated Professor Subotnik’s keen insights and stimulating ideas shared at the NIE Distinguished Speaker Series 2018. Prof Subotnik’s books include:“Genius Revisited: High IQ Children Grown Up”, “The Talent Gap”, and “Malleable Minds: Translating Insights From Psychology And Neuro science To Gifted Education”. She received the Mensa Education and Research Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.
Through NIE, an autonomous institute of NTU, the Office of Graduate Studies and Professional Learning offers high quality and rigorous doctoral degree programmes that will change your thinking, develop advanced research skills and the ability to think deeply and critically about your field or discipline of study. For more information about our doctoral programmes, please visit us at: www.nie.edu.sg/edd www.nie.edu.sg/phd For more information about the other higher degree programmes offered through GPL, please visit us at: www.nie.edu.sg/gpl
