BRILLIANT MINDS: THE ROLE OF UNIVERSITIES IN SUPPORTING STUDENTS WITH EXTRAORDINARY ABILITIES

Every now and again, as teaching academics in the university sector, we come across a student who we recognise as being clearly different from their peers. They may not always be the best academic performers in the classroom, they may not be class leaders, nor even appear to be particularly interested in learning the ‘stuff’ that will ensure that they achieve top grades. However, in the way that they respond and interact, you know that these individuals somehow possess an ability to identify issues, and ultimately find solutions to problems that most of us would never be able to contemplate.

In an era of economic rationality, few universities, if any, throughout the world have been able to avoid the reality of addressing the issue of matching economic imperatives with academic initiatives. Thus in our environment of educational massification it is more convenient to virtually ignore the potentials that such students offer. But simply ignoring a group of students, who are more capable of developing innovative ideas and thus potentially more capable of providing alternative perspectives for advanced problem solving, might be considered as one of our more serious human resource management inefficiencies.

While as teachers we may not be capable ourselves of generating the innovative ideas of these brilliant mind students, we can provide environments in which their ideas are more likely able to be converted into meaningful outputs and resources. Addressing this issue led to the following research question. What guiding principles might be applied in higher education to allow the potentials of such students to be realized, preparing them to better contribute to society through their special outputs? We put forward a framework which we refer to as the 4 x I model that may assist in capturing the untapped potential of these brilliant minds.