Article

Money over Merit? Socioeconomic Gaps in Receipt of Gifted Services

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Abstract

In this essay, Jason A. Grissom, Christopher Redding, and Joshua F. Bleiberg investigate the receipt of gifted services based on the socioeconomic status (SES) of elementary school students and their families. Using nationally representative longitudinal data, they show that gaps in the receipt of gifted services between the highest and lowest SES students are profound, and these gaps remain substantial even after taking into account students' achievement levels and other background factors and using school fxed effects to explain school sorting. The authors discuss several potential approaches schools and districts can use to ameliorate the apparent disadvantages students from low-SES families experience in processes surrounding receipt of gifted services.

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... This gap in identification rates between high-and low-poverty schools widened during the 2010s (Yaluma & Tyner, 2021). Using student-level data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey, Grissom et al. (2019) reported raw disproportionality rates by SES: 14% of students in the top SES-status quintile were identified as gifted as compared to only 2% in the bottom SES quintile. 4 and 10 percentage points in the fifth quintile (Grissom et al., 2019). ...
... Using student-level data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey, Grissom et al. (2019) reported raw disproportionality rates by SES: 14% of students in the top SES-status quintile were identified as gifted as compared to only 2% in the bottom SES quintile. 4 and 10 percentage points in the fifth quintile (Grissom et al., 2019). In the fifth quintile, just under 15% of White students were identified as gifted but only 5% of Black students were identified as gifted (Grissom et al., 2019, p. 351). ...
... Therefore, studies that used censuses of students instead of samples and that used all students instead of just students in gifted programs would provide more robust estimates of the conditional odds of being identified as gifted. Therefore, the Backes et al. (2021), Hamilton et al. (2018), and Warne et al. (2013) studies provided better estimates than Grissom and Redding (2016) and Grissom et al. (2019) studies. ...
Article
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Is underrepresentation of Black students, Latinx students, English learners (EL), and students from economically challenging communities in gifted programs due to inequality in early academic achievement or bias in the gifted identification process? Using three-level multilevel logistic models, we examine the degree to which the disparities in gifted identification are due to disparities in early achievement. Our datasets include 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-grade achievement scores and demographic variables from all students in a 3rd-grade, 2011–2012 cohort across three states. Students who qualified for free/reduced-price lunch (FRPL), EL, and Black or Latinx students were between two to eight times less likely to be identified as gifted compared to non–free/reduced-price lunch, non-EL, and White or Asian students. However, between 50% and 100% of gifted identification disparities could be explained by student-level differences in early academic achievement, which is consistent with an opportunity gap explanation of underrepresentation.
... As there are various suggestions, SES can be measured as a latent construct with various composites of indicators such as occupation, education, income, place of residence, or immediate neighborhood (APA Dictionary of Psychology, n.d.; Baker, 2014). However, these indicators can differ depending on the cultural context (Grissom, Redding, & Bleiberg, 2019;Mueller & Parcel, 1981). In its broader sense, SES is frequently defined as access to financial, human, and social capital, with indicators such as income, occupational status, and assets. ...
... Maternal and paternal level of education was categorized as up to high school, high school, bachelor's degree, and higher. For the second, it should be noted that the perceived SES may vary depending on the cultural context (Grissom et al., 2019;Mueller & Parcel, 1981). Therefore, to account for the diverse economic conditions across different cities of Turkey, avoid numbers that are likely to be affected by economic fluctuation, inflation, or fluctuation in the power of purchase over time, and the role of the immediate economic context on educational opportunities; the perceived household income level was used (Table 2). ...
... This will contribute to a chain reaction of positive contributions. As a first ring, for example, typically, gifted students are admitted into educational programs following the identification, where differentiated curricula and support are provided to meet their academic needs that cannot be accommodated in standard general education settings (Grissom et al., 2019). These programs could benefit students and their families academically and emotionally (Rogers, 2007). ...
Article
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This correlational study examines the relationship between identification as gifted and various indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) among high school students living in Turkey. The relatively large and representative sample consists of 688 high school students, both identified (n = 343) and unidentified (n = 345) as gifted, enrolled in nationwide after-school gifted education programs. The "identified" group comprises adolescents who scored an IQ index of 130 or higher, while the unidentified group comprises high school students attending formal educational institutions without meeting the IQ-based identification criterion. Chi-square tests of independence were utilized to investigate the relationship between identification status and SES indicators such as perceived household income, parental education level, current area of residence, and area of residence where most of life is spent. The results indicate that identified participants are more likely to come from families with higher perceived income and parental education levels, live in urban areas, and spend most of their lives in urban areas compared to the unidentified group. Overall, the findings suggest that SES factors might play a significant role in the identification of giftedness students in Turkey. The findings are discussed around the problem of underrepresentation in traditional identification methods, with a focus on educational equality within the framework of systems theory and critical systems theory.
... Many taken-for-granted school practices operate as what we call status-reinforcing processes. These include tracking, ability grouping, gifted programming, and standardized testing (Barlow and Dunbar 2010;Gamoran and Mare 1989;Grissom, Redding, and Bleiberg 2019;Grodsky, Warren, and Felts 2008;Horn 2018;Joensen and Nielsen 2009;Knoester and Au 2017;Kohn 2000;Lewis and Diamond 2015;Oakes 1982;Rist 1970;Rose and Betts 2004;Sacks 1997;Staiger 2004;Tyson 2011). ...
... In the U.S., despite known limitations of standardized tests (Becker 1972), mathematics performance is seen as a core indicator of students' aptitude (Stevenson and Stigler 1994;Uttal 1997). U.S. schools thus use students' math grades and test scores to determine ability-group, gifted program, and track placements from a very early age (Gamoran and Mare 1989;Grissom et al. 2019;Lewis and Diamond 2015;Oakes 2005;Oakes et al. 1990;Tyson 2011). Ability grouping and tracking influence students' math confidence and anxiety (Boaler 2002;Horn 2008) and their course-taking trajectories (Battey and Leyva 2016;Long, Conger, and Iatarola 2012;Muller et al. 2010;Planty, Provasnik, and Daniel 2007). ...
... Taken-for-granted practices in education serve as status-reinforcing processes when they amplify and then justify the inequitable treatment of students from different status groups. Tracking, ability grouping, gifted programming and standardized testing are key examples of such practices (Grissom et al. 2019;Grodsky et al. 2008;Horn 2018;Joensen and Nielsen 2009;Knoester and Au 2017;Kohn 2000;Lewis and Diamond 2015;Oakes 1982;Rist 1970;Rose and Betts 2004;Sacks 1997;Tyson 2011). In this paper, we reveal that homework practices can also operate as status-reinforcing processes. ...
Preprint
Practices like ability grouping, tracking, and standardized testing operate as status-reinforcing processes-amplifying then naturalizing unequal student outcomes. Using a longitudinal, ethnographic study following students from elementary to middle school, we examine whether math homework can operate similarly. Because of inequalities in families' resources for supporting homework, higher-SES students' homework was more consistently complete and correct than lower-SES students' homework. Teachers acknowledged these unequal homework production contexts. Yet, official policies treated homework as an individual endeavor, leading teachers to interpret and respond to homework in status-reinforcing ways. Students with consistently correct and complete homework were seen as responsible, capable, and motivated and rewarded with praise and opportunities. Other students were seen as irresponsible, incapable, and unmotivated; they were punished and docked points. These practices were status-enhancing for higher-SES students and status-degrading for lower-SES students. We discuss implications for homework policies, parent involvement, and interpretations of inequalities in school. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
... Considering how exposure to accelerated coursework may be the source of academic achievement benefits associated with gifted identification and how participation in integrated classes can contribute to student wellbeing in myriad ways, it leads to questions 62 For a summary of this literature, see Burris (2019) 61 Dobbie & Fryer (2013) 60 Hamilton et al. (2018) 59 Crabtree et al. (2019) 58 Grissom et al. (2019) 57 Consistent with national survey findings in Callahan et al. (2017) about how beneficial it actually is for students to receive gifted services in isolation from their peers. Furthermore, restricting access to accelerated elementary coursework to only a select few students may prove disruptive in promoting access into the advanced coursework pipeline, as explored in the following section. ...
... Parents also recognized that their child may be the only student of color in gifted classrooms that are traditionally not very racially diverse. Conversely, the Grissom et al. (2019) observed how middle-and upper-class parents tend to be more likely to participate in school activities, partially because of having fewer time constraints related to having basic needs met, but also because their cultural and racial experiences are more likely to align with that of the school. ...
... The VDOE gifted regulations also call for "identification and placement committees" at the division or school level for determining student eligibility for gifted and talented programs. 155 Grissom et al. (2019) 154 Peters & Engerrand (2016, p. 164) 153 Peters & Engerrand (2016) 152 Peters & Engerrand (2016) Card & Giuliano (2015); Rowe (2017) 149 Lidz (1991); Lidz & Macrineb (2001) The purpose of the committee is to "review pertinent information, records, and other 156 performance evidence for referred students." The regulations indicate that these 157 committees shall include teachers, administrators, assessment specialists, gifted program staff, and other professionals with experience in gifted education. ...
Article
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Giftedness as a construct continues to be contested in academia, in the classroom and around kitchen tables. It means different things to different communities and, as a result, acquiring the "gifted" label looks different around the country. Once labeled, student giftedness produces different responses depending on state and district guidelines. A constant among the patchwork of defining, identifying and responding to student giftedness, though, is a serious racial and economic disparity in who is considered gifted and who is not. This report provides key takeaways from research literature on gifted and talented (GT) programs. It is organized according to five questions: 1) What does it mean to be "gifted?" 2) Who receives gifted services? 3) Why does this mater? 4) What factors contribute to disparities in gifted services? and 5) What strategies help to address disparities in gifted education?
... While there is a federal definition of giftedness outlined in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that focuses on students demonstrating "evidence of high achievement capability" in a variety of domains, there is no universal definition of what it means to be "gifted" (Parr & Stevens, 2019). This means that giftedness is often defined at the state and division level (Callahan et al., 2017), which also means that there is often considerable variability in how it is determined (Grissom et al., 2019). Often, giftedness is assessed through students scoring in the 95th percentile or above on standardized measures of achievement (Crabtree et al., 2019). ...
... Identification for gifted programs is often based on standardized test performance, which have often been shown to be culturally biased (Grissom et al., 2017). Furthermore, if a school does not provide universal testing for its students for the purposes of gifted identification, testing may be more likely to occur privately by higher SES parents who are willing to request it, even repeatedly, through child psychologists (Grissom et al., 2019). • Tracking. ...
... Educators often serve as gatekeeping mechanisms for gifted programs by recommending students to participate (Callahan et al., 2017). While identification may also be based on more seemingly objective measures like standardized testing, requesting subjective recommendations from educators may contribute to the potential for bias in who gets identified (Grissom et al., 2019). • School resource differences. ...
Article
Full-text available
MERC is developing a literature brief on gifted services in elementary school as a part of our Equitable Access and Support for Advanced Coursework Study. The brief will be published in the fall of 2020. In the meantime, here are some highlights from the research that help answer the question, “who receives gifted services in elementary school?” Writing Team: David Naff, PhD (MERC/VCU SOE), Amy Jefferson (VCU SOE), Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, PhD (VCU SOE), Michael Schad, PhD (VCU Alt Lab), Zoey Lu (VCU SOE), Kathryn Haines (Chesterfield), Morgan Saxby (Chesterfield)
... However, two challenges have plagued GT education since its inception and made it difficult to achieve this goal. First, gifted programs have been dominated by students from white, Asian American, and upper-income backgrounds (Grissom, Redding, & Bleiberg, 2019;Peters et al., 2019), and this disparity has persisted despite years of debate about how it should be addressed. Second, there is conflicting evidence about the outcomes of gifted programs. ...
... To some degree, both of these issues can be traced to the selection process for gifted programs. For example, the low proportion of Black students in these programs can be attributed, at least in part, to poorly designed approaches to determining which students will receive services, such as when school leaders rely on referrals from teachers and parents (Grissom, Redding, & Bleiberg, 2019;McBee, Peters, & Miller, 2016). For that matter, even a seemingly "objective" selection process can favor students who aren't likely to benefit from the program, while excluding those who would. ...
Article
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 education should exist as one pathway through which students can have their needs met. Scott Peters, James Carter, and Jonathan Plucker outline several best practices in identifying gifted and talented students that, if implemented, would better align with the goal of gifted education, while also improving equity.
... The disproportional underrepresentation of students of color and those from low-income families remains a persistent issue in gifted education (Grissom et al., 2019;Hamilton et al., 2018;Long et al., 2023;Peters et al., 2019). American K-12 students are far more racially/ethnically diverse than the teacher workforce National Center for Education Statistics [NCES]. ...
Article
Teacher rating scales (TRS) often play a part in service eligibility decisions for gifted services. Although schools regularly use TRS to identify gifted students either as part of an informal nomination process or through behavioral rating scales, there is little research documenting the between-teacher variance in teacher ratings and the consequences of such rater dependence. To evaluate the possible benefits or disadvantages of using TRS as part of a gifted identification process, we examined the student-, teacher-, and school-level variance in TRS, controlling for student ability and achievement to determine the unique information, consistency, and potential bias in TRS. Between 10% and 25% of a students’ TRS score can be attributed to the teacher doing the rating, and between-teacher standard deviations represent an effect size of one-third to one-half standard deviation. Our results suggest that TRS are not easily comparable across teachers, making it impossible to set a cut score for admission into a program (or for further screening) that functions equitably across teachers.
... Masking behaviors, however, such as emotional and behavioral issues often evidenced by twice-exceptional students also did not seem to be at issue [66][67][68]. Given the reported achievement scores were matched according to the posterior probabilities from the achievement model, any masking behaviors present among these twice-exceptional students were not substantial enough. ...
Article
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The current study examined the underidentification of students with disabilities for gifted education programs, otherwise referred to as twice-exceptional students. This study utilized data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011 (ECLS-K). We estimated that approximately 17% to 18% more students with disabilities should have been identified for a gifted education program as having statistically similar achievement scores to those students without disabilities in gifted education programs. Alternatively stated, students with disabilities should make up 10.8% of gifted programs, or about 1 in 9 students in gifted programs should be twice-exceptional. Students with disabilities who were male, non-White, low-income, and indicating more internalizing problem behaviors were more likely to not be identified for a gifted education program despite having similar achievement scores.
... For example, parents with access to clinical psychologists have their students privately evaluated in pursuit of the gifted label. These traditions are neither equitable nor best practices in gifted identification (Grissom et al., 2019;Lamb et al., 2022;Peters, 2022). ...
Chapter
This chapter depicts a gifted identification method using K–8 student data profiles. This method of gifted identification aligns student needs with comprehensive gifted and talented programming, and student data serve to inform instruction, not solely to identify whether or not students exhibit giftedness. Under the gifted and talented specialist's guidance, a trained committee conducts an anonymized review of data on the student profiles to uncover extraordinary potential, creativity, aptitude, and achievement while identifying the targeted student needs through universal screening. This chapter also examines the first-hand application of this student profile review. Anecdotes and documented experiences demonstrate the gifted identification process using student profiles capturing local norms, multiple criteria, and gifted service goals to guide the committee's anonymized review.
... Ten of the articles discussed data on students and schools in the United States, and 1 study examined articles from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Germany, New Zealand, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States that were part of a systematic review comparing academic and sports talent development (Faber et al., 2022). Eight of the studies used quantitative methods (Carman, Walther, & Bartsch, 2018Grissom et al., 2019;Jordan et al., 2012;Lamb, Boedeker, & Kettler, 2019;Peters, Gentry, et al., 2019;Wai & Lakin, 2020), and 3 used qualitative methods (Faber et al., 2022;Matthews & Rhodes, 2020;. A theme about reducing excellence gaps that was common to all 11 articles was that screening all students for advanced learning opportunities and evaluating students' academic needs in their local contexts can eliminate some barriers to advanced academic programming. ...
Article
Unequal access to advanced learning opportunities is among the most complex and controversial issues in American K–12 schools. Interventions that address policy, programming, and instruction can provide opportunities for students with advanced learning needs in school systems that prioritize minimum grade-level standards. Excellence gaps are differences in advanced performance among student subgroups that result from inequities in education and society. In this systematic review of the literature, the authors identified 80 empirical research studies on strategies for reducing excellence gaps published between 2010 and 2021 and identified themes related to the seven facets of the Excellence Gap Intervention Model (K–12 school accountability support, teacher professional learning, expanded advanced learning opportunities, universal screening with local norms, frontloading, flexible ability grouping, psychosocial interventions). This analysis revealed substantial evidence of intervention development over the past decade and suggests a revised approach to equitable, advanced education that begins with preparation (e.g., teacher professional learning, student frontloading) and is followed by placement, evaluation, and adjustment as students’ learning needs change.
... Peters (2021) highlights a variety of systemic reasons traditional gifted identification processes may fail to equitably identify traditionally underrepresented students; however, at the core of Peter's argument is a defense of the gifted and talented label. Common criticisms of gifted education include that it promotes fixed labels attached to opaque instructional practices or services that provide greater advantages to a privileged few (Grissom et al., 2019). The gifted label also attracts stereotypes and misconceptions relative to student behaviors and services. ...
... Gifted and talented education (GATE) exemplifies racial and economic hierarchies that exist in our society, with historically marginalized (HM) students significantly less likely to be identified as gifted, and subsequently receiving gifted services, than their peers (Grissom et al., 2019). Peters (2021) advanced the dialogue around inequities by attempting to not only highlight their existence but to also offer insights into the barriers to overcoming inequity. ...
... The disproportionality in the ethnic-racial and socioeconomic make-up of students in gifted and talented education (GATE) programs has been identified by many scholars as the most critical and the most intractable issue facing the field of gifted education (e.g., Grissom & Redding, 2016;Olszewski-Kubilius & Steenbergen-Hu, 2017;Plucker & Peters, 2016;Worrell & Dixson, 2018). Considered a fundamental equity issue by many (e.g., Peters & Engerrand, 2016)-that is, an issue of fairness-there is a growing body of scholarship on what should be done (Ford, 1998;Grissom et al., 2019). However, despite the efforts of many researchers and educators (e.g., Horn, 2015;Lee et al., 2009), this disproportionality has not been remedied (Peters, Gentry, et al., 2019), and indeed, the problem is perceived as more urgent in the sociohistorical context of 2021, with the increased focus on civil rights and social justice. ...
... Current literature on gifted identification urges educators to apply multiple criteria to identify students for gifted programs (Acar et al., 2016;McBee et al., 2016), but how those multiple criteria are used also is of great importance Peters et al., 2020). Given the representation discrepancy in gifted identification by race (Grissom & Redding, 2016), English-language learner status and socioeconomic status (Grissom et al., 2019;Peters et al., 2019), strategies such as universal screening and universal consideration (McBee et al., 2016), the use of local norms (Peters et al., 2019), and the use of alternative assessment (Silverman & Gilman, 2020) seem to have the potential to improve the representational fairness of the identification process. ...
Article
In this study, we applied different text-mining methods to the originality scoring of the Unusual Uses Test (UUT) and Just Suppose Test (JST) from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)–Verbal. Responses from 102 and 123 participants who completed Form A and Form B, respectively, were scored using three different text-mining methods. The validity of these scoring methods was tested against TTCT’s manual-based scoring and a subjective snapshot scoring method. Results indicated that text-mining systems are applicable to both UUT and JST items across both forms and students’ performance on those items can predict total originality and creativity scores across all six tasks in the TTCT-Verbal. Comparatively, the text-mining methods worked better for UUT than JST. Of the three text-mining models we tested, the Global Vectors for Word Representation (GLoVe) model produced the most reliable and valid scores. These findings indicate that creativity assessment can be done quickly and at a lower cost using text-mining approaches.
... Finally, average school SES has been shown to predict achievement (Grissom, Redding, & Bleiberg, 2019). As a proxy for average school SES, we also included average school free or reduced lunch rate (FRL) as a control variable. ...
Article
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 initial level of achievement interacts with subsequent growth as children move through school. Aim: Using Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) and return on investment as theoretical grounding, this registered report examined how students' initial academic performance relative to their school predicts their subsequent academic achievement. The stage 1 accepted registered report is available at https://osf.io/9zmak/. Specifically, we tracked the achievement of a cohort of students who started at or above their school's mean at the beginning of third grade and tested a range of hypotheses regarding their achievement and growth as well as which students showed the greatest gains from their time in school. Sample: Using a large database of student academic achievement in the United States, this registered report included de-identified data from all students from fall 2014 to spring 2017 in grades three through five from the ten US states with the highest participation for the Northwest Evaluation Association's Measures of Academic Progress (MAP®) - a computer adaptive test of academic achievement in mathematics and reading. Because the MAP is taken at least twice per school year, up to six scores were included on mathematics and reading achievement for effective samples of approximately 220,000 students. Method: We built separate reading and mathematics three-level piecewise longitudinal hierarchical linear models (student repeated measures, nested within students, nested within schools) to model student growth from the beginning of third grade to the end of fifth grade (i.e., three academic years and two summers). Results: For both mathematics and reading, average student achievement growth slowed as they progressed from third through fifth grade. From there, the findings diverged. In mathematics, student growth was mostly similar across achievement levels and grades from third through fifth. However, in reading, above-average students demonstrated slower growth than average students during the school year but faster growth during the summer. Also of note, at the beginning of third grade, the highest achieving students outscored average students in their school by more than 2 years in mathematics and 3 years in reading. Conclusions: Our results may be able to be explained via a ZPD model, which posits development only occurs when students are placed in appropriately challenging environments. In mathematics, the observed pattern of relatively consistent growth across achievement levels suggests average students were just as likely to be in their ZPD as higher achieving students. In reading, as initial achievement increased, student reading growth slowed, which suggests the higher the initial achievement, the less likely students were to be in their ZPD. If a goal of education is for students to learn new things, our results suggest existing school offerings in reading are not meeting that goal equitably for students across the performance spectrum. Differential growth patterns should be considered when designing learning experiences for students who enter with a wide range of prior mastery.
... Grissom et al. (2019) 129 Burney (2010); Theokas & Saaris (2013); Vansciver (2006) 128 Lewis & Sekaquaptewa (2016); ...
Article
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This report from the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC) explores research related to Advanced Placement (AP) courses through an equity lens. It answers five questions: 1) What are AP classes? 2) Who enrolls and succeeds in AP classes? 3) Why do disparities in AP matter? 4) What factors contribute to disparities in AP participation and performance? 5) What policies and practices help to address disparities in AP access, enrollment, and performance? The report comes from the MERC Equitable Access and Support for Advanced Coursework study.
... This point means that parents with the cultural capital to advocate for their student's identification are more likely to have a student who is identified as gifted. The myriad ways that parents are able to insert themselves into the identification process may help explain the substantial SES differences in identification rates documented by Grissom et al. (2019). Card and Giuliano (2016) found that a system in which all students are screened or GIFTED EDUCATION EQUITY 16 considered for gifted identification-thereby removing parental advocacy as a component in the gifted process-is far more equitable. ...
Article
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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 in K–12 schools. The purpose of this article is to outline why such inequity exists and why common efforts to combat it have been unsuccessful. In the end, poorly designed identification systems combined with larger issues of societal inequality and systemic, institutionalized racism are the most likely culprits. I end the article with a hierarchy of actions that could be taken—from low-hanging fruit to major societal changes—in order to combat inequity in gifted education and move the field forward.
... Carman and Taylor (2010) controlled for SES using eligibility for federal meal subsidy as a proxy to examine identification rates for gifted services for students identified using the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (NNAT; Naglieri & Ford, 2003). On a national scale, Grissom et al. (2019) examined the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K): 1998 and found that students from high SES households had significant advantages in being identified for gifted services compared with their peers from low SES households within the same school. Using nationally representative data sets to examine access to gifted education can be misleading, though, as state policies regarding gifted education vary greatly across the United States (Peters et al., 2019). ...
Article
Proportional identification of students for gifted services in Florida school districts is an important goal. A multi-level model was used to analyze school district data from the Florida Department of Education from the 2011–2016 academic years. Results from the study indicate that the likelihood of identification of students varied by their socioeconomic status. Students who were Black were 59% more likely to be identified for gifted services if they participated in federal meal subsidy programs. However, the likelihood of identification for students who are Latinx or Native American decreased by 47% and 38%, respectively, when compared with peers who did not participate in federal meal subsidy programs.
... In a follow-up analysis, Grissom et al. (2019) investigated the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) and the intersection of SES and other studentand school-level factors on probability of identification. The effect of higher SES was profound but also unequal in its benefits. ...
... The highest income group produces 47% of those identified as gifted, and the lowest income group produces 9% of the students identified as being gifted and talented (Hodgkinson, 2006). Grissom et al. (2019) used a nationally representative data set to show that SES differences persisted even controlling for academic achievement among those in the same schools. Multiple ideas have been provided for why poverty has a strong impact on gifted and talented student identification including (a) limited access to resources to build foundational skills, (b) victim-blaming or identifying a culture of poverty in which poor students and families are seen as at fault for their poverty and lack of achievement, (c) overrepresentation of poor children in special education caused by higher rates of disability and poorer health care, and (d) the social and cultural context of the child and school (Burney & Beilke, 2008). ...
Article
We analyzed data from a large-scale ( N = 39,213), longitudinal study of urban students to assess child factors (gender, ethnicity, English language learner status, school readiness skills, type of pre-K attended, early elementary school academic performance) prospectively associated with eventual gifted identification in elementary school. Overall, 14.2% of students were identified as gifted in K-5th grade, with the majority identified by second grade. Multivariate logistic regression analyses revealed that White and Latino students were more likely to be identified as gifted than Black students, even controlling for poverty and early academic performance. English language learners, boys, and those who attended public school pre-K programs were more likely to be identified controlling for other factors. School readiness assessments were also useful for predicting giftedness.
Article
Taking advanced courses in high school predicts many positive outcomes, yet low-income students and students who identify as Black and Hispanic are underrepresented. Policies such as “algebra for all” that accelerate middle school students into advanced courses are well-studied, but little is known about newer academic acceleration policies that target older students. Between 2014–2015 and 2016–2017, 72 districts in Washington implemented Academic Acceleration policies, which identified proficient 11th- and 12th-grade students for automatic acceleration into AP, IB, and other dual credit courses. We used difference-in-differences models to examine changes in advanced course enrollments, GPAs, and high school graduation between districts that began implementing the policy at different times. We found advanced course enrollment increased and became more equitable postpolicy.
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Purpose: This comparative case study focused on high schools in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia using the lens of Culturally Responsive School Leadership to investigate the actions of school leaders in implementing detracking and asks How do school leaders’ actions regarding detracking fit into the larger framework of Culturally Responsive School Leadership? Research Methods: This study uses a qualitative comparative case study method involving interviews with leadership team members at detracking high schools. Findings: Leaders in all the schools explicitly demonstrated creating inclusive spaces, embracing community assets, and enacting culturally responsive instructional leaders. Leaders at three of the schools explicitly celebrated students’ identities. Leaders at two of the schools suggested they engage in critical self-reflecting aimed at combating biases against minoritized students but did not explicitly mention this self-reflection. Implications for Researchers and Practitioners: Though emergent in nature, these findings add to our collective knowledge about practices in detracking schools that may be beneficial elsewhere and being to fill in gaps in our knowledge about specific detracking conditions over which school leaders have control. These findings also demonstrate a need for researchers, professors of leadership education, and policy makers to support school leaders in becoming culturally responsive and sustaining the practices at the heart of CRSL. Applying this framework allows for a rigorous discussion of leaders’ specific actions along with avenues of detailed consideration for researchers, educators of future school leaders, and policy makers in a coherent manner to create and sustain schools that can serve all children well.
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In this article, I examined parents’ views of a gifted and talented (G&T) phase out proposal in an effort to document how the aspirational class can disrupt, instead of reproduce, racial inequities in diverse schools. Using qualitative methods, I found that parents’ educational consumption practices fit with their philosophy of education, value system and identity, and cultural capital. Some enrolled their child in the G&T program as a cultural signal to others about their high status positioning, their ability to volunteer and fundraise, and future academic aspirations for their child. Meanwhile, other parents advocated for the phase out proposal as a cultural signifier of their community values and focus on non-academic outcomes. When confronted with the negative outcomes of segregated programs, some aspirational class parents can and will push back on the structures of inequality by supporting integration goals.
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Exceptionally talented refugee students are often underrepresented in allocating to gifted programs because of inadequate identification methods in Arab countries. This study investigates the Arabic version of the Having Opportunities Promotes Excellence (HOPE) Scale for identifying gifted refugee students. Students ( n = 13,598) from refugee camp schools in Jordan were surveyed in the 2020/2021 academic year. Elementary, middle, and high school teachers ( n = 423) completed the translated Arabic version of the HOPE Scale, measuring 11 items on the academic and social construct of giftedness. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated an excellent fit; however, multigroup confirmatory factor analysis results revealed that the scale needed more invariance across groups. The results suggest that although the HOPE Scale-Arabic version has sufficient validation evidence, careful consideration is required when applying it to different subgroups of refugee students. Constructs of cultural relevance may need to be added to better assess the item’s validity.
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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 representation. This paper attempted to fill that void by analyzing data from the Civil Rights Data Collection and Stanford Education Data Archive along with original coding of state GT policies. We found that while ELs and SwDs are disproportionately underrepresented within the population of students identified as gifted, state mandates for schools to offer GT, requirements for formal gifted education plans, and regular audits for compliance were correlated with higher rates of GT service availability and greater representation among ELs and SwDs. We further describe the characteristics of the top 5% of schools with the highest GT representation for ELs and SwDs.
Article
This mixed-methods study investigated the pandemic's impact on gifted identification among Arkansas's demographic groups and gifted services. The provision of gifted services during the pandemic varied, leading to differences in instructional practices and technology access. Nomination and identification processes were disrupted, hindering the recognition of giftedness, especially among underrepresented populations, and this was reflected in the identification numbers. Participants indicated that the pandemic has led to decreased funding for gifted programs, reduced administrator support, less time for students to participate in gifted classes, and increased responsibilities for gifted teachers. These factors have left teachers feeling overwhelmed and resulted in decreased student engagement, more behavioral issues, and academic struggles. The diversion of resources and priorities away from gifted education further exacerbated the inequities in gifted programs.
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The introduction will give readers a brief history of tracking and detracking so they may situate themselves in the existing literature. This will explain how I chose the focal high schools and that the schools are all presented using pseudonyms and vague information about their whereabouts to protect participants’ anonymity. Finally, the introduction will also include a map of the structure of the book and explain why the focal high schools are included.
Article
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 short, they can be a means through which schools serve a more diverse student population. This is possible by mandating access to gifted services in all schools, making sure all students are universally screened for eligibility, and using within-building comparisons to determine eligibility. Scott J. Peters, Matthew C. Makel, and James S. Carter III outline this perspective and explain why it would be effective at mitigating school segregation and popular among a broad range of constituencies.
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Ten years ago, Sunnydale High School leaders worked with teachers and community members to create an international baccalaureate (IB)-for-all model to prevent racially and socioeconomically identifiable class levels. For nearly a decade, the program has been successful with stakeholders largely supporting the model. Following pandemic-related school building closures, faculty at Sunnydale High School are having trouble continuing to support students who had vastly different online school experiences. Some faculty and community members have asked the leadership to reconsider the model because they feel some students need additional support that cannot be provided in pre-IB or IB classes while maintaining high expectations for other students. The author offers learning activities through the lens of social justice leadership.
Article
This study illustrates the consequences of accounting for or ignoring teacher variability in student ratings in conjunction with combination rules when identifying students for gifted services in one rural primary school. Teachers ( n = 16) rated 282 first-- and second grade students on creativity, motivation, mathematics, and science. Results indicated the most variability in how teachers used the science scale and the least variability in the mathematics scales. Further, teachers rated female students higher than male students in motivation, but not on any other scale. More students were identified if the top students were identified in each class versus the top students in each grade level, and largely, the students who were identified within their classrooms were not the same students who were identified within their grade level. And as expected, OR rules resulted in the highest number of students identified. Implications and recommendations are discussed.
Article
Students in any grade level vary widely in their mathematics achievement, with the typical classroom including four to seven grade levels of mathematics proficiency. Due to this large range of mathematics learning needs, some schools offer certain courses in earlier grades than is typical. In this study, we analyzed multiple, large, national datasets to understand which schools provide access to seventh-grade algebra and eighth-grade geometry. Next, we explored what factors predicted school-level access to those courses and the proportion of eligible students enrolled in either course. We found that access varies widely across, and even within, states and districts, with factors such as parental education and within-district economic segregation remaining predictive even after controlling for average school achievement. In general, predictors of the proportion of a school identified as gifted were weaker, but schools in more-segregated districts and those with larger proportions of White students enrolled did tend to enroll fewer students in either math course.
Article
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 tested whether these variables remained predictive after controlling for state mandate to provide services, average district achievement, and average school achievement. Results showed that states varied, with some serving 20% of their students as gifted and others serving 0%. Similarly, within-district income segregation, income-related achievement gaps, and parental education were dominant predictors of a school offering gifted and talented services and the size of the population served, even after controlling for achievement and the presence of a state mandate. These findings suggest that gifted and talented programs are often made available based on school or community demographics rather than the needs of the students.
Article
This manuscript focuses on the various ways that the gifted label hinders the field of gifted and talented education (GATE) from progressing into a more inclusive and equitable field. Specifically, this manuscript outlines how (a) the social status that the gifted label confers is problematic for achieving equity within GATE, (b) how the gifted label impedes the ability of GATE programs to meet the real-time advanced academic needs of a more diverse group of students, and (c) how the gifted label encourages the perspective that gifted ability is general in nature (as opposed to domain-specific), which results in many students from underrepresented groups getting fewer opportunities to receive advanced academic services.
Article
The phrase ready to learn has been widely used and researched by scholars, policy makers, and education practitioners. School readiness, as a construct, has referred to the basic skills that children need to transition to elementary school. However, there is no consensus on which basic skills students should possess when entering kindergarten, and even less for bilingual learners. In this article, we draw on interview data from 15 staff members in one urban public elementary school in the U.S. Northeast. We focus on how teachers and staff perceived their Brazilian students’ disposition in kindergarten and first grade. Most of these professionals (nine out of fifteen) were themselves of Brazilian descent, shedding light on the understudied complexities of immigrant school personnel?s positions and experiences in the multicultural landscapes of U.S. public schools.
Article
Growing concerns about inequitable access have made public investment in gifted programs controversial in many school districts, yet advocates maintain that gifted services provide necessary enrichment for exceptional students to succeed at school. We provide evidence on whether the typical gifted program indeed benefits elementary students’ achievement and nonachievement outcomes, using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, 2010–2011 kindergarten cohort. Leveraging within-school and within-student comparisons, we find that participating in a school’s gifted program is associated with reading and mathematics achievement for the average student, although associations are small. We find no evidence of a relationship between gifted participation and student absences, reported engagement with school, or student mobility. Black and low-income students do not see the academic gains that their peers experience when receiving gifted services.
Article
This study assesses the excellence gap by examining those who enroll in advanced, honors, and advanced placement (AP) classes among a low-income and a majority-Latinx population. Prospective longitudinal data come from a diverse, urban sample ( N = 32,885) where 82.2% of the students received free or reduced price lunch. We examined numerous predictors (i.e., demographics, school readiness skills, prior academic competence) for eventual enrollment in an advanced course (middle school advanced, honors in middle and high school, and AP courses in high school) via multivariate logistic regression analyses. Results suggest that demographic factors (socioeconomic status, ethnicity, English-language learner status) often played a smaller role in advanced course enrollment after controlling for school-entry skills and prior academic competence with the exception of AP courses, where demographic effects persisted. Implications include targeted early intervention to get qualified students in poverty enrolled in academically advanced courses.
Article
This article tests hypotheses by examining variations in the percentage of elementary and middle schools offering gifted and talented programs as well as gifted student participation and representation between 2012 and 2016. Using the Office of Civil Rights and the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) Common Core data, we find that between 2012 and 2016, the percentage of schools with gifted programs declined slightly. Crucially, gifted participation is increasing faster in low-poverty schools than in high-poverty schools. Furthermore, suburban schools became more likely to have gifted programs than urban, rural, or town schools. However, gifted participation by urbanicity decreased across all four locales. Using only 2016 data, we show that students who are Black and Hispanic continue to be statistically underrepresented. We conclude with a brief discussion and policy implications.
Article
This is the second of three articles on “Sources of Authority in Education”. All use the work of Amy Gutmann as a heuristic device to describe and explain the prevalence of market-based models of Education Reform in the United States as part of what Pasi Sahlberg terms the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). This movement is based on neoliberal tenets and encourages the enterance of private business and the adoption of business practices and challenges long standing notions of democratic education. The first article is “Negating Amy Gutmann: Deliberative Democracy, Education and Business Influence” (to be published in Democracy and Education) and the third is “The Odd Malaise of Democratic Education and the Inordinate Influence of Business” (to be published in Policy Futures in Education). My intent is to include them, along with a fourth article, “Profit, Innovation and the Cult of the Entrepreneur: Civics and Economic Citizenship,” as chapters of a proposed volume, Democratic Education and Markets: Segmentation, Privatization and Sources of Authority in Education Reform. The “Negating Amy” article looks primarily at Deliberative Democracy. The present article considers the promise of Egalitarian Democracy and how figures such as Horace Mann, John Dewey, and Gutmann have argued it is based largely on the promise of public education. “The Odd Malaise” article begins by offering some historical background, from the origins of the common school in the 1600s to market emulation models, No Child Left Behind and how this is reflected in a “21st century schools” discourse; it ends by considering and underlying theme: what happens to the Philosophy of Education when Democracy and Capitalism are at odds. The “Profit, Innovation” article then looks at how ideological forces are popularized, considering Ayn Rand’s influence, the concept of Merit, Schumpeter’s concept of ‘creative destruction,’ and the ideal of the entrepreneur as related sources in a changing common sense, pointing out that the commonplace of identifying the innovator and the entrepreneur is misplaced. The present article accordingly begins to question business influence and suggest show we may outline its major features using Amy Gutmann’s work as a heuristic device to interpret business-influenced movements to reform public education. Originally the title was Turning Amy Gutmann on her Head. Consequently it returns to Gutmann’s Democratic Education and its three sources of authority, suggesting that the business community is a fourth source. As such, it is in a contest to supplant the systems of deliberative democracy for which Gutmann advocates. It continues with a consideration of what might be called a partial historical materialist analysis – the growth of inequality in the United States (and other countries) since the 1970s; this correlates with much of the basis for changes in the justifications and substance of Education reform. After casting this question in principal-agent terms, it then looks at both those who sought to create a public will for public education and recent reform movements that have sought to redirect public support from a unified education system and instead advocate a patchwork of charters, vouchers for private schools, on-line education, home schooling, virtual schools and public schools based on market emulation models. Drawing from other theories of education, especially Plato (and the Spartan model), Locke, and John Stuart Mill, it also suggests that it might be instructive to compare Gutmann’s three sources of authority to Abraham Kuyper’s concept of Sphere sovereignty. It concludes that ultimate authority for education is —or should be—, somewhat paradoxically, vested in the adult the child will become, creating practical problems regarding the education of the sovereign that are never fully resolved and which may, in fact, be unresolvable based on rational deliberation. Finally, it looks at one instrument of business, market segmentation, and its importance as a motivating factor for education reform.
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Educational psychology is replete with verbal or qualitative definitions through which students can be considered members of categories, such as learning disabled, autistic, or gifted. These conceptions carry quantitative implications regarding the incidence rates of the phenomena they describe. To be scientifically useful, such definitions should have sufficient specificity and internal consistency. We analyzed four influential definitions of giftedness and assessed their internal consistency by computing the giftedness rate implied by each. Results reveal that the proportion of individuals who meet the standard of giftedness under some definitions is unrealistically high (e.g., >75% in some conditions). The implication of this work is that the rigor and internal self-consistency of educational concepts requires improvement. The field must carefully consider the quantitative implications of its concepts, statements, and definitions. An Open Science Framework project page containing R code, a technical appendix, and all figures and tables from this paper is available at https://osf.io/6e7g9/.
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Using a two-phase content analysis approach, this study examined how education scholars have discussed the intersection of giftedness, race, and poverty in gifted academic journals from 2000 to 2015. Specifically, the authors explored the following questions: (a) What are the characteristics of studies published that explore the intersection of giftedness, poverty, and students of color? (b) How do scholars discuss and theorize about how to recruit and retain gifted students of color who come from families living in poverty? (c) In what ways do scholars discuss the intersection of race and poverty for gifted students of color? Findings indicated that while studies were focused on students of color, there was limited discussion about the impact of race and poverty on the recruitment and retention of gifted students of color who come from families living in poverty. Implications and future research are discussed.
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Gaps in educational achievement between high- and low-income children are growing. Administrative data sets maintained by states and districts lack information about income but do indicate whether a student is eligible for subsidized school meals. We leverage the longitudinal structure of these data sets to develop a new measure of economic disadvantage. Half of eighth graders in Michigan are eligible for a subsidized meal, but just 14% have been eligible for subsidized meals in every grade since kindergarten. These children score 0.94 standard deviations below those who are never eligible for meal subsidies and 0.23 below those who are occasionally eligible. There is a negative, linear relationship between grades spent in economic disadvantage and eighth-grade test scores. This is not an exposure effect; the relationship is almost identical in third-grade, before children have been exposed to varying years of economic disadvantage. Survey data show that the number of years that a child will spend eligible for subsidized lunch is negatively correlated with her or his current household income. Years eligible for subsidized meals can therefore be used as a reasonable proxy for income. Our proposed measure can be used to estimate heterogeneous effects in program evaluations, to improve value-added calculations, and to better target resources.
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Students of color are significantly underrepresented in gifted programs relative to their White peers. Drawing on political science research suggesting that public organizations more equitably distribute policy outputs when service providers share characteristics with their client populations, we investigate whether representation of students of color in gifted programs is higher in schools with racially/ethnically diverse teachers and principals. In a nationally representative sample of elementary schools created by merging two waves of data from the Civil Rights Data Collection and the Schools and Staffing Survey, we find that schools with larger numbers of Black teachers or a Black principal have greater representation of Black students in gifted programs. We find a similar relationship for Hispanic teachers and representation of Hispanic students. Further evidence suggests that a critical mass of teachers of color is necessary for teacher race/ ethnicity to be associated with higher representation of students of color in gifted programs.
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Academic achievement gaps between high- and low-income students born in the 1990s were much larger than between cohorts born two decades earlier. Racial/ethnic achievement gaps declined during the same period. To determine whether these two trends have continued in more recent cohorts, we examine trends in several dimensions of school readiness, including academic achievement, self-control, externalizing behavior, and a measure of students’ approaches to learning, for cohorts born from the early 1990s to the 2000–2010 midperiod. We use data from nationally representative samples of kindergarteners (ages 5–6) in 1998 ( n = 20,220), 2006 ( n = 6,600), and 2010 ( n = 16,980) to estimate trends in racial/ethnic and income school readiness gaps. We find that readiness gaps narrowed modestly from 1998 to 2010, particularly between high- and low-income students and between White and Hispanic students.
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This study compares the early life experiences of kindergarteners in 1998 and 2010 using two nationally representative data sets. We find that (a) young children in the later period are exposed to more books and reading in the home, (b) they have more access to educational games on computers, and (c) they engage with their parents more, inside and outside the home. Although these increases occurred among low- and high-income children, in many cases the biggest changes were seen among the lowest-income children. Our results indicate narrowing but still large early childhood parental investment gaps. In addition, socioeconomic gaps in preschool participation grew over this period, despite substantial investments in public preschool. Implications for early socioeconomic achievement gaps are discussed.
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Students of color are underrepresented in gifted programs relative to White students, but the reasons for this underrepresentation are poorly understood. We investigate the predictors of gifted assignment using nationally representative, longitudinal data on elementary students. We document that even among students with high standardized test scores, Black students are less likely to be assigned to gifted services in both math and reading, a pattern that persists when controlling for other background factors, such as health and socioeconomic status, and characteristics of classrooms and schools. We then investigate the role of teacher discretion, leveraging research from political science suggesting that clients of government services from traditionally underrepresented groups benefit from diversity in the providers of those services, including teachers. Even after conditioning on test scores and other factors, Black students indeed are referred to gifted programs, particularly in reading, at significantly lower rates when taught by non-Black teachers, a concerning result given the relatively low incidence of assignment to own-race teachers among Black students.
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An issue of much concern, and under much scrutiny and debate, is the persistent and extensive under-representation of African American students in gifted education. A number of efforts have been proposed and implemented to improve their recruitment and retention, but to little or no avail. Progress has been slow or non-existent in many cases. In this article, we propose that several theories and conceptual frameworks can guide educators and decision makers in gaining a better understanding of under-representation. In understanding the barriers to recruitment and retention through the lens of theories and frameworks, we can develop solutions that work. Nine theories and frameworks are presented
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In this article, we attempt to distinguish between the properties of moderator and mediator variables at a number of levels. First, we seek to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating, both conceptually and strategically, the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ. We then go beyond this largely pedagogical function and delineate the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena, including control and stress, attitudes, and personality traits. We also provide a specific compendium of analytic procedures appropriate for making the most effective use of the moderator and mediator distinction, both separately and in terms of a broader causal system that includes both moderators and mediators. (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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The authors hypothesize that gifted individuals are subject to microaggressions based on their unique characteristics. These microaggressions are perpetuated when gifted individuals are also Black, Hispanic, or low income. Research from the field of gifted education is combined with the counseling and psychology literature to explore the common assumptions that may lead to microaggressions. Multicultural considerations for counseling are discussed through the context of giftedness. Recommendations for counseling culturally different and low-income gifted students are presented.
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Participation in gifted and talented (G&T) programs is predicted to have negative effects on academic-but not nonacademic-self-concept on the basis of social comparison theory and Marsh's big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE). In two studies, students in G&T-programs experienced systematic declines in three components of academic self-concept (Reading, Math, School) over time and in relation to matched comparison students in regular mixed ability classrooms, but not an four components of nonacademic self-concept (Physical, Appearance, Peer Relations, Parent Relations). in both studies, these results were consistent over gender, age, and initial ability level. Selection criteria, program strategies, and advice to parents are proposed to counteract this BFLPE and to maximize the benefits associated with G&T programs.
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The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity is a comprehensive scholarly handbook on creativity from the most respected psychologists, researchers and educators. This handbook serves both as a thorough introduction to the field of creativity and as an invaluable reference and current source of important information. It covers such diverse topics as the brain, education, business, and world cultures. The first section, 'Basic Concepts', is designed to introduce readers to both the history of and key concepts in the field of creativity. The next section, 'Diverse Perspectives of Creativity', contains chapters on the many ways of approaching creativity. Several of these approaches, such as the functional, evolutionary, and neuroscientific approaches, have been invented or greatly reconceptualized in the last decade. The third section, 'Contemporary Debates', highlights ongoing topics that still inspire discussion. Finally, the editors summarize and discuss important concepts from the book and look to what lies ahead.
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The concept of cultural capital has been increasingly used in American sociology to study the impact of cultural reproduction on social reproduction. However, much confusion surrounds this concept. In this essay, we disentangle Bourdieu and Passeron's original work on cultural capital, specifying the theoretical roles cultural capital plays in their model, and the various types of high status signals they are concerned with. We expand on their work by proposing a new definition of cultural capital which focuses on cultural and social exclusion. We note a number of theoretical ambiguities and gaps in the original model, as well as specific methodological problems. In the second section, we shift our attention to the American literature on cultural capital. We discuss its assumptions and compare it with the original work. We also propose a research agenda which focuses on social and cultural selection and decouples cultural capital from the French context in which it was originally conceived to take into consideration the distinctive features of American culture. This agenda consists in 1) assessing the relevance of the concept of legitimate culture in the U.S.; 2) documenting the distinctive American repertoire of high status cultural signals; and 3) analyzing how cultural capital is turned into profits in America.
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This study focused on the analysis of a large-scale data set ( N = 326,352) collected by the Georgia Department of Education using multilevel path analysis to model the probability that a student would be identified for participation in a gifted program. The model examined individual- and school-level factors that influence the probability that an individual would be identified. The probability of being identified as gifted depended strongly on student race and socioeconomic status and varied strongly across schools. Putting the Research to Use This study provides a comprehensive examination of racial and socioeconomic disparities in gifted program participation in one state mandating gifted education and an identification scheme designed to increase participation among traditionally underrepresented groups of students. In spite of these policies, identification rates still varied widely across race and socioeconomic status. The study found that race still exerted strong effects on the probability of identification even after socioeconomic status was controlled. Furthermore, the study found that schools varied widely in the gifted identification rate even when some student characteristics were controlled. This study suggests that much work remains to be done in terms of ensuring that all students, regardless of background, have access to advanced educational programs.
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Focusing on parental networks—a central dimension of social capital—this article uses ethnographic data to examine social-class differences in the relations between families and schools. We detail the characteristics of networks across different classes and then explore the ways that networks come into play when parents are confronted by problematic school situations. The middle-class parents in our study tended to react collectively, in contrast to working-class and poor parents. The middle-class parents were also uniquely able to draw on contacts with professionals to mobilize the information, expertise, or authority needed to contest the judgments of school officials. We did not find substantial race differences. We affirm the importance of a resource-centered conception of social capital that grants the issue of inequality a predominant place.
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Concerns over recruiting and retaining minority students in gifted education programs have persisted for several decades, and, although many educators, policymakers, and researchers have deliberated about the underrepresentation of minority students in gifted education, few articles, reports, or studies exist on this topic. This article seeks to fill this void, describing factors that inhibit the recruitment and retention of minority students in gifted education programs. These factors include screening and identification issues (e.g., definitions and instrumentation); educational issues (e.g., quality of students' education); and personnel issues (e.g., lack of teacher training in gifted and urban education, low teacher referral). Also discussed are retention issues, namely, factors that may affect the decision of minority students to remain in gifted education programs. Finally, recommendations for recruiting and retaining minority students are offered.
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Nondiscriminatory assessment practices have been proposed as a model of assessment for individuals of diverse cultures who are suspected as having a disability. This paper presents the use of nondiscrimina-tory assessment practices in evaluating students of diverse cultures who may be identified as gifted. Principles and guidelines for nondiscriminatory ways of assessing students of diverse cultures who may be gifted are presented. Implications for putting nondiscriminatory assessment procedures into practice are provided.
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The Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (NNAT) is said to be a culturally neutral measure of ability that assesses both majority and minority students equally. Although research has examined the effects of ethnicity and gender on NNAT performance, little published research has examined the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and NNAT performance. Correlations and multiple regression were used to examine the relationships between ethnicity, SES, and NNAT performance in a large kindergarten sample. The results suggest a significant relationship between ethnicity, SES, and NNAT performance. Even after adjusting for ethnic differences, children from low-SES families were half as likely as other children to be identified. Putting the Research to Use Does the NNAT really identify students with low-SES backgrounds at the same rate as students from average to high SES backgrounds? Although many believe using a nonverbal test levels the field for all students, the research we present does not support this belief. In this sample, students from average to high SES families were twice as likely to be identified than those from low-SES families. Since nonverbal tests are one of the most used methods of screening for G/T in our schools, if districts wish to continue to use the NNAT, it should not be as a solo measure of ability, but rather as part of a multiple measure process. In addition, districts using the NNAT should calculate the differential of any particular test administration on the basis of gender, ethnicity, SES or other variables to determine if any adjustments need to be made to ensure that elusive level playing field.
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Research on race, social class, and parent involvement in education often implies that parents’ educational orientations result directly from their social class or racial group backgrounds. In this article, the authors study the involvement of working-class and middle-class African American parents. They argue that these parents’ educational orientations are informed by the educational environments they navigate, their resources for negotiating these environments, and their prior social class and race-based educational experiences. Middle-class African American parents studied were more likely to select their children’s schools, assess them favorably, and adopt supportive orientations toward them. In contrast, working-class African American parents studied were assigned to schools, tended to assess them less favorably, and adopted more reform-based orientations toward them. The article extends prior work by studying social class and parent involvement within the African American community and by highlighting the interaction between parents’ perceptions of school context and their educational orientations.
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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 conducted on the HOPE Scale, a 13-item teacher-rating instrument designed to identify academic and social components of giftedness in elementary-aged students. Participants included 349 teachers who completed HOPE Scales on 5,995 ethnically and economically diverse students from three rural and two metropolitan school districts in the Midwest. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis was also used to evaluate measurement invariance between income groups. Findings suggest a two-factor model represents good fit for the data while remaining loyal to the latent constructs of academic and social giftedness. Although showing some legitimate mean differences, invariance test results suggested equivalence of model form, factor loading, and factor variances across income groups. Putting the Research to Use This research has important implications for practice. Frequently, traditional measures of achievement or aptitude under-identify children from low-income families. Concerns exist about the usefulness of teacher-ratings forms or scales in gifted and talented student identification. However, when given specific items or descriptors, teachers can provide useful information concerning student performance. The HOPE Scale provides items that teachers can use to rate specific social and academic behaviors of their students. Findings from this study revealed that teaches can effectively nominate low-income students for gifted programs. Further, items on the HOPE Scale were not biased against low-income students as rated by their teachers, meaning that the social and academic scales provided similar information concerning students in either income group. However, mean scores for student from low-income families on both scales were lower than their non-low income peers, providing evidence that instruments need to be normed on the specific groups for which their use is intended. Practitioners, should not shy away from using teacher nomination instruments, but they should consider the psychometric information available concerning the use of these instruments or rating forms as used with students in demographic groups of intended use. The HOPE Scale, as developed with indicated revisions, will provide educators and researchers with a simple, psychometrically sound instrument to help with identification of underrepresented student for gifted education services.
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This article explores the social processes and outcomes associated with a school-linked, community-based program that successfully engages Latino parents and children in a low-income school community. Framed by an ethnographic, embedded case study design, the authors collected data from 32 Latino parents. The findings detail parents’ experiences when first entering the neighborhood and how these experiences shape their engagement with other parents in the program and neighborhood community. We conclude that efforts engaging low-income parents as communities of practice hold special promise for reducing barriers to children’s learning, especially when school leaders, community-based organizations, and social researchers leverage their resources and capital in ways that support parents’ efforts, insights, and aspirations.
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This study examined the level and impact offive types ofparent involvement on elementary school children's academic achievement by race/ethnicity, poverty, andparent educational attainment. The sample comprised 415 third through fifth graders who completed the Elementary School Success Profile. Hypotheses from Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital were assessed with t tests, chi-square statistics, and hierarchical regressions. Consistent with the theory, parents with different demographic characteristics exhibited different types of involvement, and the types of involvement exhibited by parents from dominant groups had the strongest association with achievement. However, contrary to theoretical expectations, members of dominant and nondomi- nant groups benefited similarly from certain types of involvement and dif- ferently from others. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
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Cambridge Core - Sociolinguistics - Ways with Words - by Shirley Brice Heath
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The nonverbal battery of the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT) is one of the two most common nonverbal measures used in gifted identification, yet the relationships between demographic variables and CogAT7 performance has not yet been fully examined. Additionally, the effect of using the CogAT7 nonverbal battery on the identification of diverse demographic groups based on various norming, cutoff, and modifier plans has only just begun to be explored. In this study, we analyzed the CogAT7 nonverbal battery scores of kindergartners from a very large urban school district with a high minority, low socioeconomic status, and high English language learner population to determine the relationships between demographic variables and CogAT performance. The results suggest relationships between CogAT scores and multiple demographic variables, similar to other nonverbal instruments. We also examined the effects of various norming practices, including school-level and group-specific norming, on identification using the CogAT7 nonverbal battery.
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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 students. Regardless of how poverty is conceptualized, evidence suggests that U.S. childhood poverty rates are indeed high, both in absolute terms and relative to other countries, and that income-related achievement disparities are similarly large. Recommendations are included for interventions to close persistent poverty excellence gaps, including frontloading, broadened understanding of opportunity, universal screening using local norms, improved educator preparation and support, state K-12 accountability systems that reward schools for closing excellence gaps, widespread use of ability grouping, and selective use of psychosocial interventions at the college level.
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Although the relationships between family income and student identification for gifted programming are well documented, less is known about how school and district wealth are related to student identification. To examine the effects of institutional and individual poverty on student identification, we conducted a series of three-level regression models. Students of poverty are generally less likely to be identified for gifted services, even after controlling for prior math and reading achievement. Furthermore, school poverty predicts the percentage of gifted students identified in a school. Within districts, even after controlling for reading and math scores, the poorer schools in a district have lower identification rates. Whereas students of poverty are generally less likely to be identified for gifted services, poor students in poor schools are even less likely to be identified as gifted.
Article
Background/Context This work contributes to the growing body of scholarly and popular literature on middle-class parental anxiety and competition to ensure their children's academic success. Specifically, this study provides a better understanding of the measures parents will take to obtain high status gifted and talented (G&T) placements that advantage their own children at the expense of others, which is somewhat contradictory given the growing uneasiness they feel about putting their children through the testing process—and paying for test prep—that the system ultimately rewards. By analyzing the different ways in which White parents and parents of color conceive of good parenting in the era of high-stakes testing, I demonstrate the processes in our current educational system that help to produce inequities related to race, class, and G&T identification. Purpose/Objective This paper examines White parents’ beliefs about parenting as it relates to their school choice preferences in the segregated and stratified New York City school system. It also compares the parenting styles and school choices of lower income general education (Gen Ed) parents of color. It explores how parents’ social constructions of where their children belong in school are tied to their beliefs about parenting and doing what is best for their children in a highly competitive society and city. Research Design A qualitative case study was utilized to examine how a diverse group of 52 New York City parents make sense of and interact with an elementary school that offers both a segregated G&T and a Gen Ed program. The semistructured parent interview data was triangulated with school observations, a professional school-choice consultant interview, and an observation of a public school choice workshop for incoming kindergarten parents led by the consultant. Findings/Results The data show that White parents believe that paying for test prep, going through the “hassle of getting your child tested for G&T,” and receiving a high test score are symbolic of being a good parent in the system. In comparison, parents of color had different conceptions of good parenting that did not include prepping for the G&T test or getting into the G&T program, where their children would be in the minority. White parents had social networks of like-minded parents pressuring them to get into the G&T program. Black and Latino parents did not have the same G&T pressure from friends or family, nor did they view a G&T placement as giving their children extra advantages in terms of test scores or future schooling opportunities. Conclusions/Recommendations The findings suggest that the pressure for children to succeed on a single test feeds into parental anxiety and competition regarding getting their children into the high-status G&T program. Instead of trying to avoid an overly anxious parenting culture, the White advantaged parents in this setting get swept up in the test-prepping fad because everyone else is doing it and because of the competitive nature of obtaining a G&T seat. If policy officials want to attack the root of the G&T segregation problem, the city should consider phasing out district G&T programs altogether and instituting school-wide G&T magnets instead.
Article
Significance A longstanding concern about gifted education in the United States is the underrepresentation of minorities and economically disadvantaged groups. One explanation for this gap is that standard processes for identifying gifted students, which are based largely on the referrals of parents and teachers, tend to miss many qualified students. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that a universal screening program in a large urban school district led to significant increases in the numbers of poor and minority students who met the IQ standards for gifted status. Our findings raise the question of whether a systemic failure to identify qualified students from all backgrounds may help explain the broader pattern of minority underrepresentation in all advanced K−12 academic programs.
Article
Scholars have suggested that the benefits of representative bureaucracy arise from bureaucrats acting in the interests of clients who share their characteristics, increased diversity encouraging even nonminority bureaucrats work to further the interests of minority clients, and/or the actions of clients that are more responsive to bureaucrats that share their characteristics. Despite decades of research, the literature has been unable to empirically disentangle these mechanisms, primarily because the vast majority of studies examine only organization-level data, and, at the aggregate level, they all produce identical findings. In contrast, this study makes use of data that allows us to observe the behavior of individual clients and bureaucrats, as well as the aggregate characteristics of the organizations in which they interact. Specifically, we make use of student-level data to predict differences in the probability that an elementary student is referred to gifted services by race. Our results suggest that black students are more likely to be referred to gifted services when taught by a black teacher but that increased presence of black teachers in the school other than the classroom teacher has little effect. We find some evidence that the classroom teacher effect is partially driven by teachers’ more positive views of own-race students. Our results do not suggest, however, that the positive impact of teacher-student race congruence on gifted assignment can be explained by differences in student test score performance or increased parental interaction with the teacher.
Article
For the past several decades, the construct of parent involvement (PI) has framed much of the literature on school–family–community partnerships. In this study, the authors used a qualitative form of meta-analysis called thematic synthesis to explore a programmatic alternative to conventional PI known as collective parent engagement (CPE). The CPE approach examined in this study was implemented in three low-income, urban school communities. The primary goal was to help low-income parents develop programs and services that could support the strengths, needs, and challenges of children and families at school and in the community. The findings indicated that, when implemented as an isolated or “stand-alone” service strategy, CPE generally does not influence school outcomes. But when tied to a broader system of reform efforts, CPE can help transform the social-institutional landscape of low-income, urban school communities.
Book
Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously—as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children. The first edition of Unequal Childhoods was an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.
Article
Many gifted education experts have found that Black, Hispanic, and Native American students are less likely to be identified for gifted programs than Asian American and White students. A study was conducted to ascertain the degree of underrepresentation of these groups in gifted programs in Utah. Using state-collected data from 14,781 students in six representative school districts in Utah, it was found through multiple logistic regression analysis that there was no statistically significant difference in the likelihoods that Black, Hispanic, or Native American students and White students would be identified as gifted; Asian American and Pacific Islander students were more likely to be identified as gifted than White students. After controlling for academic achievement and SES, it was found that all diverse demographic groups of students were more likely to be identified as gifted than White students, although the differences did not reach statistical significance for multiracial or Native American students. Further research into the nature and causes of disproportionate representation in gifted programs is suggested.
Article
Policymakers must assess the status of information on which they base their decisions. This article presents a meta-analysis of studies of the effects of special, homogeneous classes versus regular, heterogeneous classes on achievement and nonachievement outcomes of gifted students. The principal findings indicated that the gifted students in special classes achieved more than their gifted counterparts in regular classes. There were no differences in measures of self-concept, but the gifted students in regular classes had more positive attitudes toward peers. The magnitude of the effects were questionable, however, because of the methodological weakness of matching procedures employed to define the students in special and regular classes. The effect sizes were influenced largely by the number of variables used to match the gifted students in the two classroom frameworks. Larger effect sizes were associated with studies that used few variables to match the students in the special and regular classes.
Article
Although family life has an important impact on children's chances in life, the mechanisms through which parents transmit advantages are imperfectly understood. An ethnographic data set of white and black children around 10 years old shows the effects of social class on interactions at home. Middle-class parents engage in concerted cultivation by attempting to foster children's talents through organized leisure activities and extensive reasoning. Working-class and poor parents engage in the accomplishment of natural growth, providing the conditions under which children can grow, but leaving leisure activities to children themselves. These parents also use commands rather than reasoning. Middle-class children, both white and black, gain an emerging sense of entitlement from their family life. Race had much less impact than social class. Also, differences in a cultural logic of raising children gave parents and their children differential resources to draw on in their interactions with professionals from dominant classes and other adults outside home. Middle-class children gained individually insignificant but cumulatively important advantages. Working-class and poor children did not display the same sense of entitlement or advantages. Some areas of family life appeared immune from the effects of social class, however.
Article
Work on bureaucratic representation suggests that minority citizens benefit when the programs that serve them are administered by bureaucrats with similar characteristics. This literature has not sufficiently dealt with the long-standing concern that minority benefits may come at the expense of citizens from other groups, which some critics argue makes representative bureaucracy irreconcilable with democratic values. This article suggests distributional equity as a potential moderator of bureaucratic representation and as a potential source of reconciliation. It tests for the effects of representation under different distributional conditions in a policy area in which outcomes approach a zero-sum game. Analyses of a nationally representative sample of public organizations find a relationship between bureaucratic representation and citizen outcomes only in those instances where program benefits are being inequitably distributed to the relevant group. The article concludes with a discussion of the significance of these findings for the democratic legitimacy of representative bureaucracy.
Article
In this article I seek to answer the question, ''When are racial disparities in education the result of racial discrimination?'' To answer it I synthesize the social science research on racially correlated disparities in education. My review draws from the sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, history, and education literatures. I organize explanations into six categories: biological determinism, social structure, school organization and opportunities to learn, family background, culture, and the state. I arrive at three answers. The first is a definition: Racial discrimination in education arises from actions of institutions or individual state actors, their attitudes and ideologies, or processes that systematically treat students from different racial/ethnic groups disparately or inequitably. The second answer is that while distinguishing racial discrimination from disparities may be an interesting intellectual, legal, and statistical challenge, the conclusion probably is less meaningful than social scientists and policy makers might hope. The third answer follows from the first two. I propose the following reformulation of the original question: ''When are racial disparities in education not due to discrimination?'' I argue that the reformulated question is more likely to bring solutions to the race gap than the original one. Even if we conclude that discrimination does not cause racial disparities in education, we should not conclude that schools have no role in addressing them. If public schools do not address educational disparities, then who or what institution will?
Article
A dataset containing demographic information, gifted nomination status, and gifted identification status for all elementary school students in the state of Georgia (N = 705,074) was examined. The results indicated that automatic and teacher referrals were much more valuable than other referral sources. Asian and White students were much more likely to be nominated than Black or Hispanic students. Students receiving free or reduced-price lunches were much less likely to be nominated than students paying for their own lunches. The results suggest that inequalities in nomination, rather than assessment, may be the primary source of the underrepresentation of minority and low-SES students in gifted programs.
Article
This article discusses five reconsiderations (lessons) the research on the education of the gifted and talented suggests. Although several of the considerations derive from traditional practice in the field, some reconsideration is warranted because of more currently researched differences in how the gifted learner intellectually functions. It is argued that thinking of the gifted learner as idiosyncratic, not necessarily one of many classified as “the gifted,” requires a reconceptualization of how to appropriately and fully serve this unique learner. The research synthesized here covers the period from 1861 to present and represents the entire body of published research studies and representative literature (theory, program descriptions, and persuasive essays). Implications for service development and implementation are also discussed.
Article
This project was a 2-year investigation of elementary school children placed in programs for high-ability learners. The primary purpose of the study was to investigate academic and affective changes in students during their first 2 years in a gifted program. Students were assessed during the fall of one year and the spring of the next year. Subjects were from 14 different school districts in 10 states and included African American and Caucasian/ non-Hispanic students. The study compared students enrolled in gifted programs (special school, separate class, pull-out, within-class), high-achieving students from districts in which no program was available at the designated grade levels, and nongifted students in regular classrooms. This project focused on academic and affective student outcomes through multiple administrations of an achievement test, a self-perception survey, and a motivation inventory. In addition to comparing programs in general, an important dimension of the project was to examine characteristics of students from traditionally underserved populations. This was accomplished by including the variables of racial/ ethnic status and the social status of participants. Results revealed that there were differences in cognitive and affective outcomes across program types. Therefore, it is strongly advised that educators conduct ongoing evaluations of their programs to be better able to monitor and address all students' needs.
Article
Fifty college students were interviewed about their prior experiences in gifted programs and their perspectives on the impact of these experiences on their lives. Interview questions probed the types of experiences they remembered, including the types of instruction they had, their relations with peers, and their views about how their experiences in gifted programs affected other parts of their lives. Data were analyzed qualitatively with additional topics and themes emerging. In this paper, the author shares their voices and discusses the implications of their reports.
Article
This article presents results from a meta-analysis of findings on the effects of accelerated instruction on elementary and secondary school students. The data for the meta-analysis came from 26 controlled studies. The analysis showed that examination performance of accelerates surpassed by nearly one grade level the performance of nonaccelerates of equivalent age and intelligence. Examination scores of accelerates were equivalent to those of same-grade but older, talented nonaccelerates. Nonintellective outcomes were investigated relatively infrequently in the 26 studies and were not consistent from study to study.
Article
This paper discusses the rationale for developing performance assessment tasks to augment the identification of more economically disadvantaged and minority students for gifted programs in one state; provides a blue-print for the development protocol, including preteaching, rubrics, and exemplars; and shows major findings for use of the protocol with intended students. The performance assessment tasks were developed and revised based on try-out, pilot, and field test data collected across multiple districts with more than 4,000 students at primary and intermediate grades. Appropriate technical adequacy data were used for decision making on task and rubric revisions. Criterion levels of performance within domains were developed to ensure inclusion of populations of interest without compromising the integrity of the task protocols. The performance assessment tasks of Project STAR resulted in finding an additional group of students who were 12% African American and 14(Y) low-income children dunng the field test of the instrument. These students represent those who would not have qualified for gifted programs using traditional measures. In that sense, the assessment approach yields a “value-added” component to the state identification system. Thus, Project STAR provides an effective and innovative approach to finding more low-SES and minority gifted students for programs.
Article
Gifted and talented education programs provide children who have been identified as having high ability in some intellectual or creative characteristic with a supplemental curriculum to their traditional coursework. Despite the popularity of these programs, the literature lacks a comprehensive review of gifted education in the United States. This policy brief aims to fill this void by providing national and state-level statistics on participation rates, funding appropriations, and policies on gifted education. Since many of the operational details of these programs are determined by local education agencies, data on a nationally representative sample of schools are then used to provide information on gifted curricula, instructor training and experience, and the selection process for admission. Finally, a review of the research on gifted education is provided. This research highlights that gifted programs vary widely and that further research on this topic can provide valuable information to policy makers and educators. © 2011 Association for Education Finance and Policy
Article
This paper summarizes a qualitative study of family-school relationships in white working-class and middle-class communities. The results indicate that schools have standardized views of the proper role of parents in schooling. Moreover, social class provides parents with unequal resources to comply with teachers' requests for parental participation. Characteristics of family life (e.g., social networks) also intervene and mediate family-school relationships. The social and cultural elements of family life that facilitate compliance with teachers' requests can be viewed as a form of cultural capital. The study suggests that the concept of cultural capital can be used fruitfully to understand social class differences in children's school experiences.
Article
Words) 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 paper presents the findings of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses conducted on the HOPE Scale, a 13-item teacher-rating instrument designed to identify academic and social components of giftedness in elementary-aged students. Participants included 349 teachers who completed HOPE Scales on 5995 ethnically and economically diverse students from three rural and two metropolitan school districts in the Midwest. MCFA was also used to evaluate measurement invariance between income groups. Findings suggest a two-factor model represents good fit for the data while remaining loyal to the latent constructs of academic and social giftedness. Invariance test results suggested equivalence of model form, factor loading, and factor variances across income groups.
Article
This study tracks the profile data of identification for gifted students in South Carolina, where a new performance-based dimension of identification has been employed, during a 3-year period. Targeted to identify more low-income and minority students, the identification protocol demonstrates efficacy in doing so. The study also tracks comparative data, showing the verbal and nonverbal profiles of students identified using this protocol in comparison to students more traditionally identified. Results suggest that students identified using performance tasks were more likely to be identified through the nonverbal assessment component of the tasks. Performance data are tracked across 2 years, showing that performance task-identified students, in general, perform at levels below traditionally identified students. In their area of strength, however, they tend to approach the mean for the traditionally identified gifted students on that portion of the high-stakes state test.