Institutional Models of Gifted Education: A Comparative Study of Different National Contexts

Giftedness remains one of the most contested constructs in educational research, situated at the intersection of debates on human potential, equity, and the purposes of schooling. While contemporary scholarship has moved toward multidimensional and developmental conceptions of giftedness, educational systems continue to rely on more constrained and standardized approaches to its identification and support. This article advances a comparative institutional analysis of gifted education, drawing on a systematic review of research published over the past fifteen years. Rather than comparing national systems as discrete cases, the study identifies recurring institutional configurations through which gifted education is organized across contexts. Three dominant models are distinguished: decentralized, differentiation-based, and centralized. These models differ not in how giftedness is conceptualized, but in how it is operationalized through the institutional alignment of identification, educational provision, and long-term developmental pathways. The analysis demonstrates that the core challenge in gifted education lies in the misalignment between increasingly complex theoretical models and the institutional mechanisms through which they are enacted. As a result, giftedness emerges not only as an individual attribute, but as an outcome shaped by governance structures and policy design. By shifting the focus from identification to institutional organization, the article reframes gifted education as a problem of system design and highlights the need to examine how educational structures enable or constrain sustained talent development.