Talent Development & Excellence

April 2014 Talent Development & Excellence Guest Editors: Hans Gruber & Heidrun Stoeger Official Journal of the Editor-in-Chief: Albert Ziegler Associate Editors: Bettina Harder Jiannong Shi Wilma Vialle This journal Talent Development and Excellence is the official scholarly peer reviewed journal of the International Research Association for Talent Development and Excellence (IRATDE). The articles contain original research or theory on talent development, expertise, innovation, or excellence. The Journal is currently published twice annually. All published articles are assessed by a blind refereeing process and reviewed by at least two independent referees. Editor-in-Chief is Prof. Albert Ziegler, University of Erlangen- Nuremberg, Germany. Manuscripts can be submitted electronically to [email protected]. Editor-in-Chief: Albert Ziegler, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany Associate Editors: Bettina Harder, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany Jiannong Shi, Academy of Sciences, Beijng, China Wilma, Vialle, University of Wollongong, Australia International Advisory Board: Ai-Girl Tan, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Barbara Schober, University of Vienna, Austria Carmen M. Cretu, University of IASI, Romania Elena Grigorenko, Yale University, USA Hans Gruber, University of Regensburg, Germany Ivan Ferbežer, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Javier Tourón, University of Navarra, Spain Mantak Yuen, University of Hong Kong, P.R. China Marion Porath, University of British Columbia, Canada Osamah Maajeeni, King Abdul Aziz University, Saudi- Arabia Peter Merrotsy, University of New England, Australia Petri Nokelainen, University of Tampere, Finland Robert Sternberg, Tufts University, USA Wilma Vialle, University of Wollongong, Australia Wolfgang Schneider, University of Würzburg, Germany Impressum: V.i.S.d.P.: Albert Ziegler, St.Veit-Str. 25, 81673 München, Germany Talent Development & Excellence Volume 6 Number 1 2014 Contents Special Issue – Guest-Editors: H. Gruber and H. Stoeger Cultures of Expertise: The Social Definition of Individual Excellence 1 H. Stoeger and H. Gruber How Does Collaborative Authoring in Doctoral Programs Socially Shape Practices of 11 Academic Excellence? K. Hakkarainen, K. Hytönen, K. Lonka, and J. Makkonen Experts in Science: Visibility in Research Communities 31 M. Rehrl, T. Palonen, E. Lehtinen, and H. Gruber Brain Cancer, Meat Glue, and Shifting Models of Outstanding Human Behavior: Smart 47 Contexts for the 21st Century J. McWilliams and J. A. Plucker “Persons in the Shadow” Brought to Light: Parents, Teachers, and Mentors – How 57 Guidance Works in the Acquisition of Musical Skills A. C. Lehmann and F. Kristensen The Organisational Embedding Of Expertise: Centres of Excellence 71 H. A. Mieg Technology and Social Interaction: Notes on the Achievement of Authoritative 95 Knowledge in Complex Settings B. Jordan Talent Development & Excellence Cultures of Expertise 1 Vol. 6, No. 1, 2014, 1–10 Cultures of Expertise: The Social Definition of Individual Excellence Heidrun Stoeger1* and Hans Gruber1 Abstract: The development of research on excellence is outlined. It is argued that a focus on the heredity of excellence, which marked the beginnings of scientific research into excellence and then prevailed for a long time, fails to explain many important issues. Social mechanisms underlying the growth and acquisition of individual excellence are classified in terms of clusters of excellence at different levels (cultures, families, geographical clusters, groups, excellent organizations). Misconceptions about the emergence of clusters of excellence and about individual expertise are analyzed. It is reviewed how the contributions to this special issues help to overcome these misconceptions. Keywords: Clusters of excellence, Cultures of expertise, Individual expertise, Social definition of excellence The Individual as the First and Principal Object of Inquiry in Excellence Research Excellence research got off to a bad start. The pioneer of excellence research, Francis Galton, was interested in the heredity of intelligence and talents. In Hereditary genius (1869), Galton attempted to substantiate his assumption about the inherited nature of excellence using a method known as historiometry. Galton’s 1874 book English men of science: Their nature and nurture ranks as the first empirical study in the field of excellence research. Using his historiometric approach, Galton designed a questionnaire and sent it to 190 fellows of the Royal Society. He wanted to find out about the social and ethnic backgrounds of their families. He was interested, for instance, in the fellows’ respective order of birth among their siblings. Galton’s larger concern was to understand the relationship between nature and nurture in the development of excellence. Galton was, in fact, the person who coined the term ‘nature and nurture’ that later became a catchphrase common in developmental psychology and educational science. While Galton’s work produced interesting results, in particular with respect to questions of the sociology of science, its implications were also quite limited. His notion that excellence was a condition resulting almost exclusively from individuals and their heritable traits sent generations of researchers down the wrong heuristic path. According to today’s terminology, Galton would qualify as an expertise researcher in that he studied individuals with long track records of exceptional achievement (Posner, 1988). Giftedness research complements this line of inquiry, and early giftedness researchers also accepted Galton’s assumption by focusing on identifying individuals (usually children and adolescents) whom they suspected had an innate potential for excellence. The leading early representative of this line of inquiry is Lewis M. Terman, who established empirical giftedness research about 50 years after Galton published his seminal works. Using his so-called contrastive approach, Terman set out to compare “bright boys” with “stupid boys,” as he put it (Terman, 1906). In 1921, Terman started what 1 Institute of Educational Science, University of Regensburg, Germany *Corresponding author. University of Regensburg, Institute of Educational Science, D-93040 Regensburg, Germany. Email: [email protected] ISSN 1869-0459 (print)/ ISSN 1869-2885 (online) 2014 International Research Association for Talent Development and Excellence http://www.iratde.org 2 H. Stoeger & H. Gruber was to become the most renowned longitudinal study in the history of giftedness research. The study, known as “The genetic studies of genius,” was originally documented in five publications (Cox, 1926; Terman, 1926, 1930; Terman & Oden, 1947, 1959) and qualifies as the longest-running longitudinal study ever. The data Terman chose to collect reflect his acceptance of Galton’s assumption that inherent personal traits explain excellence or its lack thereof. Terman viewed IQ as the truest measure of giftedness. He also assumed that various measures of personality traits and interests would reflect inherent traits. For Terman, other variables such as family interests were only indirectly relevant. They might impede or facilitate the development of an individual’s exceptional traits. 150 years have passed since Galton presented his ideas, and a century separates us from Terman’s early work. Nevertheless, to this day excellence researchers continue to focus most of their attention on the individual. Recently published reference works in the field of excellence and talent acquisition offer ample evidence of this tendency (Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich, & Hoffman, 2006; Sternberg & Davidson, 2005). At the same time, however, a number of promising approaches suggests that this view is now undergoing fundamental change. Emblematic of such new approaches is a remark made by Csikszentmihalyi and Wolfe (2000) that the mind is not the locus of genius. Rather, excellence exists in systems made up of individuals and their environments. Ziegler describes such systems as actiotopes and sociotopes (Ziegler, 2005; Ziegler, Vialle, & Wimmer, 2013), and his view is becoming more common in giftedness and excellence research. While it reflects a rather straightforward observation, its implications for excellence research are manifold and far-reaching. The distribution of excellence is not a matter of chance – excellence is not evenly distributed. Excellence is topographically and chronologically clustered. Clusters of Excellence Unwittingly, Galton got one particular observation right about genius in his historiometric studies. The exceptional individuals he selected were topographically and chronologically contiguous. As a metaphor for the typically contiguous grouping of individuals who have achieved domain-specific excellence, we speak of clusters. In the following, we describe various types of clusters of excellence (cultures, families, geographical clusters, groups, and clusters of excellent organizations), starting first with those already described in Galton’s work. Cultures Galton’s studies consider, among others, leading poets, scholars, and philosophers of Ancient Greece (e.g., Homer, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato). In the domain of musical excellence it is striking that most of the composers Galton considered (e.g., Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Mendelssohn) came from German-speaking Europe. Furthermore, all of them were active within a relatively short period of time. The excellent painters in

Load more