When Lightning Strikes Twice: Profoundly Gifted, Profoundly Accomplished.

The educational, occupational, and creative accomplishments of the profoundly gifted participants (IQs ⩾ 160) in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) are astounding, but are they representative of equally able 12-year-olds? Duke University's Talent Identification Program (TIP) identified 259 young adolescents who were equally gifted. By age 40, their life accomplishments also were extraordinary: Thirty-seven percent had earned doctorates, 7.5% had achieved academic tenure (4.3% at research-intensive universities), and 9% held patents; many were high-level leaders in major organizations. As was the case for the SMPY sample before them, differential ability strengths predicted their contrasting and eventual developmental trajectories-even though essentially all participants possessed both mathematical and verbal reasoning abilities far superior to those of typical Ph.D. recipients. Individuals, even profoundly gifted ones, primarily do what they are best at. Differences in ability patterns, like differences in interests, guide development along different paths, but ability level, coupled with commitment, determines whether and the extent to which noteworthy accomplishments are reached if opportunity presents itself.

Teaching open and reproducible scholarship: a critical review of the evidence base for current pedagogical methods and their outcomes.

In recent years, the scientific community has called for improvements in the credibility, robustness and reproducibility of research, characterized by increased interest and promotion of open and transparent research practices. While progress has been positive, there is a lack of consideration about how this approach can be embedded into undergraduate and postgraduate research training. Specifically, a critical overview of the literature which investigates how integrating open and reproducible science may influence student outcomes is needed. In this paper, we provide the first critical review of literature surrounding the integration of open and reproducible scholarship into teaching and learning and its associated outcomes in students. Our review highlighted how embedding open and reproducible scholarship appears to be associated with (i) students' scientific literacies (i.e. students' understanding of open research, consumption of science and the development of transferable skills); (ii) student engagement (i.e. motivation and engagement with learning, collaboration and engagement in open research) and (iii) students' attitudes towards science (i.e. trust in science and confidence in research findings). However, our review also identified a need for more robust and rigorous methods within pedagogical research, including more interventional and experimental evaluations of teaching practice. We discuss implications for teaching and learning scholarship.

Differential return on investment: Academic growth in mathematics and reading based on initial performance.

BACKGROUND: Students vary in their initial achievement when they enter school and their rate of academic growth as they move through school. These differences have implications for classroom instruction and educational policy. Although previous research has examined initial achievement and growth differences, a gap remains in understanding how initial level of achievement interacts with subsequent growth as children move through school. AIM: Using Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) and return on investment as theoretical grounding, this registered report examined how students' initial academic performance relative to their school predicts their subsequent academic achievement. The stage 1 accepted registered report is available at https://osf.io/9zmak/. Specifically, we tracked the achievement of a cohort of students who started at or above their school's mean at the beginning of third grade and tested a range of hypotheses regarding their achievement and growth as well as which students showed the greatest gains from their time in school. SAMPLE: Using a large database of student academic achievement in the United States, this registered report included de-identified data from all students from fall 2014 to spring 2017 in grades three through five from the ten US states with the highest participation for the Northwest Evaluation Association's Measures of Academic Progress (MAP®) - a computer adaptive test of academic achievement in mathematics and reading. Because the MAP is taken at least twice per school year, up to six scores were included on mathematics and reading achievement for effective samples of approximately 220,000 students. METHOD: We built separate reading and mathematics three-level piecewise longitudinal hierarchical linear models (student repeated measures, nested within students, nested within schools) to model student growth from the beginning of third grade to the end of fifth grade (i.e., three academic years and two summers). RESULTS: For both mathematics and reading, average student achievement growth slowed as they progressed from third through fifth grade. From there, the findings diverged. In mathematics, student growth was mostly similar across achievement levels and grades from third through fifth. However, in reading, above-average students demonstrated slower growth than average students during the school year but faster growth during the summer. Also of note, at the beginning of third grade, the highest achieving students outscored average students in their school by more than 2 years in mathematics and 3 years in reading. CONCLUSIONS: Our results may be able to be explained via a ZPD model, which posits development only occurs when students are placed in appropriately challenging environments. In mathematics, the observed pattern of relatively consistent growth across achievement levels suggests average students were just as likely to be in their ZPD as higher achieving students. In reading, as initial achievement increased, student reading growth slowed, which suggests the higher the initial achievement, the less likely students were to be in their ZPD. If a goal of education is for students to learn new things, our results suggest existing school offerings in reading are not meeting that goal equitably for students across the performance spectrum. Differential growth patterns should be considered when designing learning experiences for students who enter with a wide range of prior mastery.

Replications in Psychology Research: How Often Do They Really Occur?

Recent controversies in psychology have spurred conversations about the nature and quality of psychological research. One topic receiving substantial attention is the role of replication in psychological science. Using the complete publication history of the 100 psychology journals with the highest 5-year impact factors, the current article provides an overview of replications in psychological research since 1900. This investigation revealed that roughly 1.6% of all psychology publications used the term replication in text. A more thorough analysis of 500 randomly selected articles revealed that only 68% of articles using the term replication were actual replications, resulting in an overall replication rate of 1.07%. Contrary to previous findings in other fields, this study found that the majority of replications in psychology journals reported similar findings to their original studies (i.e., they were successful replications). However, replications were significantly less likely to be successful when there was no overlap in authorship between the original and replicating articles. Moreover, despite numerous systemic biases, the rate at which replications are being published has increased in recent decades.