What Am I Taking Away from ECHA 2026? From Labels to Lifespan

Looking back at the sessions I attended during #ECHA2026, what strikes me most is how much the perspective within the field is shifting. This time, I deliberately chose several topics that lie somewhat outside my usual focus on education. I tried to attend as many sessions as possible on gifted adults and LGBTQ+ individuals, alongside presentations on talent development, women, 2E, underachievement, creativity, and interventions.

And it was precisely by looking at these different topics side by side that several striking common threads began to emerge.

High Ability Is a Starting Point, Not an Outcome

The first of these may be the most important: high cognitive ability is a starting point, not an outcome.

This came through particularly clearly in the Talent Development MegaModel by Worrell, Olszewski-Kubilius, and Subotnik (Subotnik et al., 2011). Abilities matter, but talent develops within specific domains, along different pathways, and in constant interaction with opportunities, effort, psychosocial skills, and mentoring. Moreover, the factors that matter change as a person progresses through their development. Knowledge and skills are crucial at first, but psychosocial skills become increasingly important along the way.

The same idea emerged in Jeb Puryear and Lindsay Ellis Lee’s session on what we actually mean by talent development. Bloom, Gagné, Renzulli, and Subotnik use different frameworks, but they share the idea that talent develops. A model is never merely theoretical language: it shapes who we see, what we define as development, and what kinds of support we provide (Puryear et al., 2026).

Mojca Juriševič also made this idea very tangible in her presentation on creativity. Creative potential is not yet creative achievement. The spark may be there, but without time, opportunities, expertise, challenge, and psychological safety, it may never grow into a lasting light.

Context Helps Shape What Potential Becomes

A second common thread is therefore the enormous influence of the environment.

This was particularly clear in the presentations on women and talent development. María Paz Gómez-Arizaga and María Leonor Conejeros-Solar showed that women’s pathways in STEM are anything but linear. Early interests and abilities matter, but teachers, parents, role models, recognition, mentoring, belonging, and opportunities also help determine whether women continue along these pathways. Interestingly, objective progress can even coincide with a temporary decline in self-confidence.

Barbara Kerr took this idea even further. Her decades of research on cognitively gifted women show how personality, interests, identification, social expectations, relationships, and family life all help shape the path toward eminence. One of the most striking findings from her research on high-achieving women in STEM was that the strongest factor distinguishing different career trajectories was not ability or mentoring, but family and having children.

This makes it clear how problematic it is to describe success or eminence solely as the result of individual ability, motivation, or perseverance. Talent never develops independently of the opportunities and constraints created by the environment.

From ‘the Gifted Person’ to Increasingly Specific Profiles

Another thing that struck me at this conference was how much attention is now being paid to more specific profiles and populations within giftedness. Twice-exceptionality has become firmly established within the research field, but we also heard about 3E (the combination of giftedness, neurodivergence, and LGBTQ+ identity), as well as profoundly gifted individuals, gifted adults, women, and other groups that have long been far less visible in traditional giftedness research.

Initially, I see this as a positive development. Perhaps we can only afford to differentiate more and more once a certain foundation has been established. First, we had to make the case that cognitively gifted learners may have different educational needs in the first place. Now, there is more room to explore what those needs look like when giftedness intersects with other characteristics, identities, or stages of life.

This gives us a richer and more nuanced understanding of giftedness. After all, there is no single ‘gifted person.’

At the same time, however, I also see a potential risk.

As conferences and research increasingly focus on giftedness in combination with autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, mental health difficulties, or other forms of neurodivergence, we may inadvertently create the impression that giftedness must always come with something else. As if giftedness on its own is somehow no longer interesting enough to study, or as if there must, by definition, be ‘something else going on’ with every cognitively gifted person.

I felt that risk during Adam Harris’s keynote on autism as well. His message about accessibility, masking, barriers, and changing the environment was highly relevant from the perspective of neurodiversity and inclusion. At the same time, I also heard the question: “What is a keynote about autism doing at a conference on giftedness?”

That reaction is interesting in itself. Of course, there are gifted autistic individuals, and this group deserves attention. But giftedness and autism are not the same, just as giftedness is not automatically synonymous with ADHD, dyslexia, or another form of neurodivergence.

For me, this is an important challenge for the field. We need to make room for 2E, 3E, and other distinctive profiles without allowing those profiles to become the new prototype of giftedness.

It reminds me somewhat of a reaction you sometimes hear from parents when a great deal of attention in the classroom is rightly devoted to students with specific needs: “But what about my child?” That response does not necessarily mean that those other children do not deserve support. Rather, it is a reminder that the large group of children who do not fit into such a specific profile still need to be seen as well.

Perhaps we need to keep asking ourselves the same question within the field of giftedness: what about the ‘simply’ gifted person?

Precisely as a field becomes increasingly specialized, we need to make sure we do not lose sight of its foundations.

Identity Is Not Peripheral to Giftedness

At the same time, this conference made a very convincing case for why this broadening of the field is necessary. Another important common thread was identity.

María Paz Gómez-Arizaga’s research on gifted adult women clearly illustrated what identification in adulthood can mean. The abilities had often been there all along: reading at an early age, immense curiosity, a constant desire to learn, intense interests. But without a framework for understanding those experiences, women could spend years feeling primarily that they were different, that they did not fit in, or that they were not competent enough.

Her formulation Telling → Connecting → Recognizing → Reframing stayed with me. Identification in adulthood may therefore be less about discovering something new and more about bringing coherence to a life that has already been lived.

The study Rianne Van de Ven is developing on professionals who work with gifted adults fits into this picture as well. Research on giftedness in adulthood remains scarce, even as it becomes increasingly clear that giftedness does not end when someone leaves school.

We saw that same lifespan perspective in Kerr’s work. She is now re-interviewing the women from her early research for Smart Girls (Kerr, 1985). They are now in their seventies. How remarkable is it to be able to examine talent development not across just a few school years, but across a substantial part of a person’s life?

Multiple Identities Call for an Intersectional Perspective

The LGBTQ+ sessions added another important layer to this discussion. Giftedness does not exist in isolation from other aspects of identity.

PJ Sedillo described how the development of a gifted LGBTQ+ identity can unfold from the initial question, “Who am I?” to self-acceptance and, ultimately, becoming a mentor to others. Shannon Fuller then deliberately shifted the perspective. Rather than studying gifted LGBTQ+ youth primarily through the lens of victimization, discrimination, and difficulties with belonging, she asked: what strengths might actually emerge as young people learn to navigate multiple identities?

Perspective-taking, metacognition, social analysis, cognitive flexibility, dealing with ambiguity, and integrating different perspectives can all emerge from this complex identity work. Interestingly, these are precisely the kinds of characteristics that are also relevant to creativity, innovation, and problem-solving.

The sessions by Lynn Carahaly and Matthew Zakreski on 2E and 3E then made clear why we need to be careful about dividing people into separate categories. A young person can be cognitively gifted, autistic, and LGBTQ+ at the same time. These aspects do not exist alongside one another as three independent boxes, but interact to shape how someone experiences themselves and the world around them.

The challenge, then, is to adopt an intersectional perspective without treating these different aspects as equivalent. We need to be able to explore what happens when giftedness intersects with other identities or neurodivergent characteristics, without automatically framing giftedness itself as a form of neurodivergence or as a problem.

Not Everyone Needs the Same Thing

And that brings me to a common thread that closely aligns with my own research on underachievement: one size does not fit all.

When we look at interventions for cognitively gifted underachievers, we also see small and inconsistent average effects. But perhaps we are partly asking the wrong question. Not only: “Does this intervention work?” but, more importantly: “For whom does it work, when, and under what circumstances?”

That is precisely what emerged from many of the other presentations as well. Not every cognitively gifted student has the same educational needs. Not every gifted adult needs the same kind of support. Not every 2E or 3E young person experiences the same challenges. Not every woman with talent in STEM encounters the same barriers.

Even within the same person, needs can change over time. This makes both a developmental and a person-centered approach essential.

Relationships Keep Emerging as a Common Thread

Another thing that strikes me when I look at all these presentations together is how often other people turn out to play a decisive role.

Mentors were given a central place in the revised Talent Development MegaModel 3.0: they can spark an interest, strengthen that interest, or ultimately help someone launch a career within a particular domain. They can serve as role models, provide emotional support, open doors to professional networks, or act as intellectual sparring partners.

For women in STEM, teachers, professors, peers, mentors, and partners all helped shape how their pathways unfolded. For LGBTQ+ youth, a single safe adult may be the person they first feel comfortable coming out to. For gifted adult women, recognition from others can help them reinterpret and make sense of their life story.

Even in research on underachievement, we see once again how the environment helps shape what happens.

Talent development, then, is never an exclusively individual process.

And Thankfully, It Wasn’t All About AI

Something else that struck me—perhaps precisely because I didn’t encounter it everywhere—was AI.

Lately, it sometimes seems as though no education conference, trade show, or professional development event can take place without a large number of sessions on artificial intelligence. I have noticed the same trend at previous conferences and, closer to home, at education fairs such as SETT in Mechelen.

That is why I actually found it refreshing that #ECHA2026 was not an AI conference disguised as a conference on giftedness.

Of course, we should not ignore AI. It is an extremely powerful technology that is creating new possibilities in education, support, and research as well. But to me, AI remains first and foremost a tool and a possible way of working, not the ultimate goal of gifted education or talent development.

At times, there seems to be an almost automatic connection between giftedness, problem-solving, innovation, and therefore AI: cognitively gifted young people are assumed to be precisely the ones who should learn to work with it, lead the way, or help shape our technological future.

But gifted thinking is not synonymous with AI. Problem-solving ability may find expression in science and technology, but just as easily in art, language, social issues, philosophy, leadership, or countless other domains. Several presentations at this conference illustrated that beautifully.

Perhaps this, too, reflected the broader message of the conference: talent development is not about steering everyone in the same direction, even when that direction happens to be particularly popular in society at the moment.

Perhaps We Need to Focus Less on Labels and More on Developmental Pathways

If I had to identify one overarching idea from the sessions I selected at the conference, it would perhaps be this.

For a long time, the field of giftedness has focused heavily on identification and categorization. Who is gifted? What score qualifies? Which characteristics are associated with giftedness? Who belongs to which group?

Those questions remain relevant. And perhaps the fact that we can now increasingly focus on adults, women, profoundly gifted individuals, 2E, 3E, and other specific groups is itself a sign that the field is continuing to develop.

But specialization should not mean losing sight of the core.

Much of what I heard at ECHA invites us to ask a different question: what happens next?

What happens to high ability when someone is not given opportunities? When they are not recognized? When a girl has the ability but gradually begins to feel less and less competent? When an adult only understands at the age of 34 why their life has taken a different path? When someone is simultaneously gifted, autistic, and LGBTQ+? But also: what happens to the cognitively gifted person who is not 2E or 3E, has no additional diagnosis, and still needs an environment in which their potential can develop?

Giftedness then becomes much less of a category and much more of a developmental pathway.

And perhaps that is the most important message I am taking away from #ECHA2026: potential tells us where someone may begin, but not where they will end up.

What happens along the way matters. Opportunities matter. Context matters. Identity matters. Relationships matter. Mentors matter. Recognition matters. Both safety and challenge matter. And above all, the person themselves matters.

For research, this means looking beyond average effects and homogeneous groups. For professionals, it means resisting the assumption that one approach will work for everyone. And for the field of giftedness, it may require a dual movement: becoming increasingly skilled at recognizing just how different cognitively gifted individuals can be, without losing sight of what cognitive giftedness itself means along the way.

For me, after these days in Dublin, that may be the most important shift of all: from label to lifespan, from potential to development, and from viewing the gifted person in isolation to understanding the gifted person within their context—in all their diversity, but without turning the exception into the new norm.

P.S. And after Dublin, it’s already time to look ahead. The next ECHA Conference will be much closer to home: from August 9–12, 2028, #ECHA2028 will take place in Leuven, Belgium! So be sure to mark the dates in your calendar. This time, we won’t have to travel far to immerse ourselves once again in several days of research and practice on giftedness and talent development.

Save the date: August 9–12, 2028!

References

• Kerr, B. A. (1985). Smart girls, gifted women. Ohio Psychology Press.

• Puryear, J. S., Meyer, M. S., Lamb, K. N., & Lee, L. E. (2026). Conceptions of giftedness and gifted education: A Q-sort approach. Gifted Child Quarterly, 70(3), 312–331. https://doi.org/10.1177/00169862251384641 

• Subotnik, R. F., Olszewski-Kubilius, P., & Worrell, F. C. (2011). Rethinking giftedness and gifted education: A proposed direction forward based on psychological science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 12(1), 3–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100611418056 

Copyright © 2026 Dr. Sabine Sypré – All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the author. Sharing online is permitted provided the author is credited and a link to this article is included.