Cool Gifted Articles

Many researchers make their work available by posting preprints, which are manuscript versions of their articles and other open sharing sites. Other articles are open access. I have collected several great resources for educators and practitioners.

Why Hasn’t the Gifted Label Caught up with Science?

The development of both special education and gifted education as fields of study were closely tied to the origins of intelligence testing in the early 20th century. While special education’s terminology has become more nuanced and circumspect over the ensuing century, the term gifted has remained unchanged despite coming under substantial criticism in recent decades for its lack of specificity and for the innateness that the term implies as the primary cause of individual differences in ability. We examine this history and the seminal nationally disseminated reports related to gifted education, from the Marland report to the present, to consider why the gifted label has persisted. We conclude with some suggestions for how these issues might be remedied.

Michael Matthews and Jennifer Jolly

Under-representation of Diverse Students

Teenage girl in hijab working on science lab

The Challenges of Achieving Equity within Public School Gifted and Talented Programs

Scott Peters

The purpose of this manuscript 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 manuscript 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.

Effect of Local Norms on Racial and Ethnic Representation
in Gifted Education

Scott Peters, Karen Rambo-Hernandez, Matthew Makel, Michael Matthews, Jonathan Plucker

In this study, we use a large data set to assess the extent to which identifying gifted students with either school-level norms or a combination of national and school-level norms would improve gifted education representation rates for students who are from African American and Latinx families.

The (Conference) Room Where it Happens: Explaining Disproportional Representation in
Gifted and Talented Education

Dante Dixson, Scott Peters, Jonathan Plucker, Carolyn Callahan

The findings indicate that after controlling for nonverbal ability, cognitive ability, math achievement, reading achievement, and teacher ratings of gifted behaviors, Black
students, Hispanic students, and students from low-income backgrounds are 1.3x to 5.4x more likely to be identified for gifted services than their similarly-scoring Asian American or higher-income peers. These results were found despite Black, Hispanic, and low-income students still being underrepresented within the gifted student population.

Inequality at the Starting Line: Underrepresentation in Gifted
Identification and Disparities in Early Achievement

Daniel Long, Betsy McCoach, Del Siegle, Carolyn Callahan, Jean Gubbins

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.

Talent Development

Developing Leadership Talent in
Adolescents and Emerging Adults: A Systematic Review

Melanie Meyer and Anne Rinn

A database search identified 38 quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies that were screened, summarized, and synthesized for discussion. The review highlighted research contexts, definitions of leadership, and the recommendations researchers made across studies. Implications for developing leadership talent and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Millions of Students are (Still) Above Grade Level:
Achievement and Achievement Variability in Mathematics and Reading Before and During COVID-19 in
the United States

Karen E. Rambo-Hernandez,
Matthew Makel, Noah Koehler

Our results indicate that (a) achievement dropped during COVID-19 relative to pre-COVID, but the drop in mathematics was larger, and (b) achievement variability increased during COVID-19, but the variability in reading was slightly more pronounced. Further, our results replicated Peters et al.’s (2017) results—large numbers of students still performed above grade level, and substantial variability in achievement was present within schools

Most Mathematics Classrooms Contain Wide-Ranging Achievement Levels

Blaine Pedersen, Matthew Makel, Karen Rambo-Hernandez, Scott Peters, Jonathan Plucker

That is, nearly 38% and 49% of students in the typical grade four and eight classroom, respectively, may require instruction substantially different from typical “grade-level” instruction in order to allow them to work within their Zone of Proximal Development for mathematics. Further, approximately 69% of grade four and 35% of grade eight classrooms included students across all four benchmarks. Finally, about 68% and 37% of the variance lay within classrooms at each grade level, respectively. These results provide evidence that one-size-fits-all age-based approaches to instruction are unlikely to provide targeted learning experiences for all students.

Identification

Best Practices in Gifted Identification

Jessica Ottwein, Lindsay Ellis Lee, Scott Peters Dante Dixson

Specifically, this chapter details how identification best practices can be implemented to improve the equivalence, effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of gifted programs. Finally, the authors provide a tool for evaluating alignment between a program’s purpose, available services, and its identification system.

Who’s Got Talent for Identifying Talent?:
Predictors of Equitable Gifted Identification for Black and Hispanic Students

Scott J. Peters, Angela Johnson, Matthew Makel & James Carter III

Our results show that state policy mandates for gifted education are predictive of higher levels of access to and equity within gifted services at the school level. The average achievement and socio-economic status of the district were positive predictors of access and equity while district proportion eligible for special education services was a negative predictor of both. Finally, we end with a description of how the top 5% most-equitable schools in the country look different from their peers.

A Critique on the Current State of Research on the Social and Emotional Experiences of Gifted Individuals and a
Framework for Moving the Field Forward

Anne Rinn

Despite multiple edited volumes dedicated to the various theories and conceptions of giftedness and talent that have been published over the past 40 years, the field of gifted education is still definitionally and paradigmatically fractured. These differences have led to a misunderstanding about the social and emotional experiences of gifted individuals that has further divided the field of gifted education. One purpose of this paper is to explain how varying definitions and paradigms of giftedness lead us to different answers and assumptions about the social and emotional experiences of gifted individuals, and the implications of those. The other purpose of this paper is to outline a framework for moving forward in thinking about and conducting research on the social and emotional experiences of gifted individuals.