Published in 2004, A Nation Deceived reported on the advantages of acceleration for gifted children, which illustrated America's inability to properly meet the needs of its most able students despite the overwhelming research supporting acceleration. The issuance of national standards by the National Association for Gifted Children also helped solidify the field's intent and provide school districts across the country with a set of programming criteria. In turn, a call was made for additional research and programming in the field of gifted education. A Nation at Risk (1983) and National Excellence: A Case For Developing America's Talent (1993), reports issued by the federal government, highlighted the missed opportunities to identify and serve gifted students nationally. Toward the close of the twentieth century, the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act funded such entities as the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented and provided grant monies for gifted education research. The definition of giftedness also expanded along with programming options now available for gifted students. Further legislative efforts by the federal government in the early 1970s brought the plight of gifted school children back into the spotlight.
The field of gifted education continued to evolve mainly in response to the changing needs of the country, especially after the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in the late 1950s.
Pioneers, such as Lewis Terman and Leta Hollingworth, spearheaded the movement and conducted some of the first widely published research studies on gifted children. The early studies of giftedness in the 1920s and 30s evolved from research on mental inheritance, subnormal children, construction of instruments to measure both the sub and supernormal, and the realization that graded schools could not adequately meet the needs of all children. At the turn of the twentieth century, advancements in education and psychology brought empirical and scientific credibility to the field of gifted education.
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