For over thirty years sporadic research has attempted to address the underrepresentation of Aboriginal students in gifted programs. What emerges from the literature is the need for cultural understanding, flexibility and sensitivity when dealing with definitional issues of giftedness, and cultural inclusivity when designing talent development programs that respond to the particular needs of gifted learners from Aboriginal backgrounds. This article will explore these issues and highlight the need for schools to value the funds of knowledge Aboriginal students bring to their classrooms, which in turn will allow for more appropriate identification protocols and programs to be put in place for these students.

Gifted students have been provided the opportunity to study three core subjects through an academically selective virtual high school in western NSW, Australia. At the same time these students continue to attend their local public high school for their other subjects. This article presents the mechanisms that have provided this opportunity, and describes successes and challenges. Students are located across 385,000 km² and meet online through web conferencing to engage in real time. They are also able asynchronously to access study materials in an online repository.

Planning for learning is essential for creating environments conducive to deep learning and to developing student understandings. Standard 3 of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL]. 2014) specifies the need for all graduate teachers to be able to 'plan for and implement effective teaching and learning'. Quality planning involves the systematic use of feedback data to design activities that encourage the assimilation and synthesis of information, leading to the creation of new understandings. Student learning should always be the goal.

The research field of metacognition sees a community lacking in rigour, continuity and shared understandings (Schraw, 2009; Shaughnessy, Veenman & Kleyn-Kennedy, 2008). The publication in 2011 of Pina Tarricone's conceptual framework and taxonomy of metacognition offered a 'comprehensive and systematic overview of the literature on metacognition' (Moshman, 2010, cited in Tarricone, 2011, p. xv), finally giving some necessary synthesis to the field. In this paper we briefly introduce some of the difficulties that continue to attribute to the inconsistency of metacognition as a concept and give an overview of Tarricone's taxonomy of metacognition. We also describe how the taxonomy contributes to deeper understandings of one popular model in gifted education. Current research is making strong links between metacognition and giftedness (Veenman, 2008), but importantly there is growing evidence that metacognition is an 'aspect of intelligence that can be more easily promoted by education' (Cornoldi, 2010, p. 257). Due to the complexity and detail of Tarricone's work and the actual taxonomy itself, it is acknowledged that this paper presents only a brief review and discussion of some of the aspects of the taxonomy, such as the supercategories of declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge. The importance of the interconnectedness of these aspects of Tarricone's framework is discussed in relation to how they underlie the metacognition and epistemic beliefs of a student to facilitate or inhibit learning.