Scott J. Peters

The ability to effectively identify students for advanced learning opportunities has been an ongoing issue within the field of gifted education. Common criteria to guide the design and evaluation of identification systems has been essentially non-existent. In this article we provide a practical guide for evaluating and reflecting on the effectivene...

Prior research documented disproportional representation across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines within the population of students identified as gifted and talented (GT). Less research has focused on what predicts improved representation for English learners (ELs) or students with disabilities (SwDs), or how state GT policies facilitate such...

Students who are Black or Hispanic have long been disproportionately represented in K–12 gifted and talented services. However, there are schools that have diverged from this trend by identifying atypically high numbers of Black and Hispanic students. In this conceptual replication of Peters and Johnson, we present predictors of whether a school of...

Universal screening is one of the most-common topics and well-accepted best practices within the field of gifted and talented education. There appears to be little disagreement that universally screening all students as part of a gifted and talented identification process results in fewer missed students. But surprisingly, there is little guidance...

Finding all the “gifted” students who would benefit from a gifted and talented service is a perpetual concern. In this article, we focus on how to effectively implement multiple criteria in identification. First, we provide some broad background before introducing three different ways to combine multiple data points (AND, OR, and MEAN) when identif...

Gifted and talented services have a long and tainted history. Since their inception, they have not served a student population that mirrored the racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic diversity of the nation as a whole. But this need not be the case. Contemporary approaches to gifted education can advance the goals of equity and school integration. In sh...

Students who are Black or Hispanic have long been disproportionately underrepresented in K-12 gifted and talented services. However, there are schools that have diverged from this trend by identifying atypically high numbers of Black and Hispanic students. In this paper we present predictors of access to and equity within gifted and talented popula...

School-based learning experiences are often designed with the “typical” student in mind. However, this may not be an optimal approach, given the variability of prior learning that exists in most classrooms. We investigated the variance in achievement within U.S. fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics classrooms using Trends in International Mathemati...

Finding all the “gifted” students who would benefit from a gifted and talented service is a perpetual concern. In this article, we focus on how to effectively implement multiple criteria in identification. First, we provide some broad background before introducing three different ways to combine multiple data points (AND, OR, and MEAN) when identif...

Debates over identification procedures for gifted and talented students dominate the field and serve as the topic of many of its internal and external debates. We believe this is due to a lack of commonly accepted criteria for how to evaluate identification procedures. In this article, we present the Cost, Alignment, Sensitivity, and Access (CASA)...

A popular identification practice to broaden the pool of students considered for gifted programs is through the use of a universal screener. Universal screening is the initial component of a two-phase identification system where data are collected from all students, but only those who pass through the universal screening phase are formally consider...

Debates over identification procedures for gifted and talented students dominate the field and serve as the topic of many of its internal and external debates. We believe this is due to a lack of commonly accepted criteria for how to evaluate identification procedures. In this paper, we present the CASA criteria, a framework to evaluate identificat...

A wide research base has documented the disproportional enrollment in K-12 special education and gifted and talented services across racial and socioeconomic lines. This study extends that knowledge base by integrating multiple population-level datasets to better understand predictors of access to and enrollment in gifted and talented services and...

Background: Students vary in their initial achievement when they enter school and their rate of academic growth as they move through school. These differences have implications for classroom instruction and educational policy. Although previous research has examined initial achievement and growth differences, a gap remains in understanding how ini...

Using TIMSS 2019 mathematics data, we investigated the variance in achievement within U.S. fourth and eighth-grade classrooms. Approximately 23% of students in a typical grade four classroom are expected to score at or below the low benchmark whereas 14% meet or exceed the advanced benchmark; these numbers are 35% and 14% for grade eight classrooms...

Conversations over who should be identified as gifted continue perpetually both within the field and in the popular media. In this article, we focus on the use of local norms as one approach to gifted identification that can increase the equity of advanced educational programs and services while also better achieving their stated purpose of providi...

K–12 gifted and talented programs have struggled with racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, native language, and disability inequity since their inception. This inequity has been well documented in public schools since at least the 1970s and has been stubbornly persistent despite receiving substantial attention at conferences, in scholarly journals, and i...

In the 21st century, what does a defensible, equitable model of gifted and talented student identification look like? For too long, gifted education’s reason for being has been unclear, and the students it has served have been from too narrow a segment of the student population. With renewed attention to equity and personalized learning, gifted edu...

Schools exist to educate, yet the emphasis on age-based, grade-level standards fails to account for the wide range of academic readiness that exists in every classroom. Special education programs exist to meet student needs; gifted education should be no different. The authors, all gifted education researchers, present a vision for a model of gifte...

Existing research practices in gifted education have many areas for potential improvement so that they can provide useful, generalizable evidence to various stakeholders. In this article, we first review the field’s current research practices and consider the quality and utility of its research findings. Next, we discuss how open science practices...

Conversations over who should be identified as “gifted” continue perpetually both within the fieldand in the popular media. In this paper, we focus on the use of local norms as one approach togifted identification that can increase the equity of advanced educational programs and serviceswhile also better achieving their stated purpose of providing...

Concerns about the replication crisis and unreliable findings have spread through several fields, including education and psychological research. In some areas of education, researchers have begun to adopt reforms that have proven useful in other fields. These include preregistration, open materials and data, and registered reports. These reforms o...

Despite considerable reform activity surrounding K-12 education over the last 20 years, racialand socioeconomic disparities among students who achieve at advanced levels have receivedlittle attention. This study examined how excellence gaps, defined as differences in performanceat the 90th percentile of subgroups, change over time and their potenti...

Despite considerable reform activity surrounding K-12 education over the past 20 years, racial and socioeconomic disparities among students who achieve at advanced levels have received little attention. This study examined how excellence gaps, defined as differences in performance at the 90th percentile of subgroups, change over time and their pote...

The purpose of education research is to better understand educational phenomena to inform policy and improve practice. Forward progress within any field is based on the validity and credibility of that field’s research base - educators cannot make informed decisions based on anecdotal evidence, opaque research practices, or on studies that cannot b...

Students have numerous opportunities to learn outside the classroom. However, with great choice comes great variability of both quality and of intent. To evaluate the effectiveness of out-of-school programs generally - as well as individual programs specifically - we must know their intended effects (program goals) as well as their actual effects....

The Center for Open Science (COS) will create an ECR Data Resource Hub to facilitate rigorous and reproducible research practices such as data sharing and study registration. The Hub will integrate training materials, infrastructure, community engagement, and innovation in research to advance rigorous research skills and behavior across the STEM ed...

Educators have sought to understand and address the disproportional representation of students from certain student subgroups in gifted education. Most gifted identification decisions are made with national comparisons where students must score above a certain percentage of test takers. However, this approach is not always consistent with the overa...

Concerns about the replication crisis and false findings have spread through a number of fields, including educational and psychological research. In some pockets, education has begun to adopt open science reforms that have proven useful in other fields. These include preregistration, open materials and data, and registered reports. These reforms a...

Scholars and practitioners within gifted and talented education have devoted substantial effort to understanding and mitigating the disproportional representation of students from certain racial / ethnic, income, language, and disability groups. In mitigating this underrepresentation, most research has focused on the actual identification or evalua...

The disproportional representation of students from various demographic subgroups within identified gifted and talented populations has long frustrated policy makers, education advocates, researchers practitioners within the field, and those concerned with societal inequality in general. Despite the prevalence of articles in the media reporting on...

Current practices in study design and data analysis have led to low reproducibility and replicability of findings in fields such as psychology, medicine, biology, and economics. Because gifted education research relies on the same underlying statistical and sociological paradigms, it is likely that it too suffers from these problems. This article d...

Gifted education teacher training, licensure, certification, and degrees are ubiquitous in the Australia and abroad, and yet whether or not such training results in changes to classroom instructional practices remains unknown. The purpose of this study was to better understand the relationship between professional development in gifted education an...

The number of economically vulnerable students in the United States is large and growing. In this article, we examine income-based excellence gaps and describe recent controversies in the definition and measurement of poverty, with an eye toward their application to gifted education and meeting the needs of talented, economically vulnerable student...

As the awareness of the existence and negative effects of excellence gaps has grown among educators and policy makers, so too has a desire for research-supported interventions to reduce these gaps. A recent review of research related to promoting equitable outcomes for all gifted students identified six specific strategies for reducing excellence g...

The ruinous consequences of currently accepted practices in study design and data analysis have revealed themselves in the low reproducibility of findings in fields such as psychology, medicine, biology, and economics. Because giftedness research relies on the same underlying statistical and sociological paradigms, it is likely that our field also...

Few topics have garnered more attention in preservice teacher training and educational reform than student diversity and its influence on learning. However, the actual degree of cognitive diversity has yet to be considered regarding instructional implications for advanced learners. We used four data sets (three state-level and one national) from di...

Policy research in gifted education has occurred at much lower rates than other areas of research within the field, such as identification and talent development. However, without changes and implementation of these policies, systematic change is unlikely to occur. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to argue that policy research should be a...

Even as the importance of replication research has become more widely understood, the field of gifted education is almost completely devoid of replication studies. An area in which replication is a particular problem is in student identification research, since instrument validity is a necessary prerequisite for any sound psychometric decision....

The use of the nomination stage as the first step in the identification process is pervasive across the field of gifted education. In many cases, nominations are used to limit the number of students who will need to be evaluated using costly and time-consuming assessments for the purpose of gifted program identification and placement. This study ev...

The commentaries in this special issue as well as the articles they address contribute to the knowledge base about advanced learners, how they are identified, and how they are best served. In our Editors’ commentary, we have organized our thoughts following the same order in which the commentaries appear in the remainder of this issue. As the other...

The identification of gifted and talented students and the accompanying fact that most identification systems result in the underrepresentation of students from African American, Hispanic, Native American, English language learning, and low-income families are two of the most discussed and hotly debated topics in the field. This article provides an...

Best practice in gifted and talented identification procedures involves making decisions on the basis of multiple measures. However, very little research has investigated the impact of different methods of combining multiple measures. This article examines the consequences of the conjunctive (“and”), disjunctive/complementary (“or”), and compensato...

The HOPE Scale was developed to identify academic and social components of giftedness and talent in elementary-aged students with particular attention to students from low-income and/or culturally diverse families. Based on previous findings, additional research was conducted on revisions made to the HOPE Scale. Items were added, and 71 teachers co...

The Hope Scale is an 11-item teacher-rating instrument designed to help identify academic and social components of giftedness. It provides insights from teachers who work with students on a daily basis, which may differ from the type of information yielded through achievement and ability tests. The Hope Scale development was made possible by the ge...

Lack of theoretical coherence in the field of gifted education has given rise to multiple attempts at a grand unification, including most recently the work of Subotnik, Olszewski-Kubilius, and Worrell (2011). The authors argue that the incoherence is an inevitable consequence of the fundamental incompatibility of theoretical and definitional featur...

An increasing number of schools are implementing gifted cluster grouping models as a cost-effective way to provide gifted services. This study is an example of comparative action research in the form of a quantitative case study that focused on mathematic achievement for nongifted students in a district that incorporated a schoolwide cluster groupi...

This Methodological Brief introduces the reader to the regression discontinuity design (RDD), which is a method that when used correctly can yield estimates of research treatment effects that are equivalent to those obtained through randomized control trials and can therefore be used to infer causality. However, RDD does not require the random assi...

For more than 30 years, underrepresentation of certain racial, cultural, and income groups in gifted and talented programs has been documented as a serious problem. Not only does this issue make gifted programs appear as if they are designed solely for upper class, dominant-culture individuals, but it also means that talented students from diverse...

Practitioners and researchers often review the validity evidence of an instrument before using it for student assessment or in the practice of diagnosing or identifying children with exceptionalities. However, few test manuals present data on instrument measurement equivalence/invariance or differential item functioning. This information is critica...

Students with exceptional academic potential who come from low-income families are frequently not identified for and consequently are underrepresented in gifted and talented programs. Because of this, new means of identifying such children must be developed. This article presents the findings of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses conducte...

My Class Activities (MCA) is an instrument that has been used for evaluation of university-based Saturday enrichment programs, but was originally normed using students in regular schools. A sample of MCA scores from 826 students in grades 3-8 from a Saturday enrichment program was used. Four different MCA models were evaluated: (a) the original MCA...

This article discusses the original development and subsequent updates and revisions made to the Teacher Observation Form (TOF). The TOF is a 12-item form to be used by evaluators in the observation of teachers of gifted and talented students. After nearly 25 years of use, the original TOF was revised based on input from content experts and modifie...

Gifted education programs at the secondary level have yet to receive as much attention as those at the primary and elementary levels. The 2007 State of the States Report found that AP courses remain the most common means of addressing the needs of high-ability high school students. This study presents the current state of high-ability programming i...