Conceptual Framework of the World Giftedness Center: Educational and Learning Capital in Megatopes.

A growing number of countries have a strong interest in assessing and improving the quality of their talent support systems. Although there are many such attempts, there is a lack of coherent conceptual foundations shared within the talent development community. In the World Giftedness center, we use the combination of two concepts. We maintain that exceptional persons require exceptional environments to develop their exceptional abilities. In the following, we will refer to such extraordinary environments as megatopes. In addition to megatopes we propose some further categories for assessing the degree to which larger social units (cities, countries, etc.) have 41 transformed environments with regard to talent development. Second, for comparative analysis of the quality of learning environments for the gifted, we propose the education and learning capital approach.