My thoughts on the study:
1) A label of gifted doesn't necessarily guarantee success later in life.
2) I think there may be a selection bias in the study, because the Target group was kids who were identified by their parents as gifted. Maybe a percentage of the kids were not gifted (say, as defined by objective measures), and the label of gifted was something these kids could never live up to. I'd like to see the study repeated with kids identified as gifted by tests, perhaps multiple tests, to assure the validity of the Target group.
3) Maybe there is a message to us as parents that labelling kids doesn't really help them. There are parallels to Dweck's work as Inky noted - not labelling the ability, but rather praising the effort.
Maybe we could add to the body of knowledge someday by enrolling our DC in a cohort study. How many kids are represented on this board? A few thousand? More?
