The intervention included in the treatment phase of the research involved the use of higher order questioning during a one-on-one story reading session. Higher order questions were defined by Barden (1995) as “those that require more than simple recall to produce an answer” . Barden defined lower order questions as “those that require responses either recalled directly from memory or cited explicitly in text”. All questions were open-ended. Lower level thinking questions, which were the only questions used during the baseline phase, were constructed using the first three levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy: Remembering, Understanding, and Applying. The higher order thinking intervention questions were constructed using teaching strategies from Frank E. Williams’s Total Creativity Program for Individualizing and Humanizing the Learning Process. Although Williams acknowledged that the model was not designed specifically for use with gifted children, and a search of the literature in gifted education revealed no studies in which its application with gifted children was evaluated, these strategies were chosen as they had been identified previously as suitable for use with intellectually gifted children and because of their perceived novelty in the prior-to-school setting. The teaching strategies chosen were Analogy, Provocative Question, Paradox, Attribute Listing, and Tolerance for Ambiguity. Definitions and examples of the questioning techniques appear in Table 2.