Federal law ensures all students with disabilities the right to a Free, Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). However, current policies governing a student’s eligibility for services may contribute to the underidentification of gifted children with co-existing disabilities—the Twice-Exceptional. The emphasis on below-grade-level (or lower) performance, without regard to ability or potential weaknesses, misses twice-exceptional students. Those who perform at grade level, by using advanced conceptual abilities and hard work to compensate, may still require interventions and accommodations to manage increasing educational demands. Otherwise, college and even high school graduation may be out of reach. This article reviews changing laws and policies, explores case studies of twice-exceptional students missed, and examines the diagnosis of twice-exceptionality through comprehensive assessment. Appropriate best practices for the identification of twice-exceptional learners, maintenance of their civil rights, and provision of FAPE are offered for educators, parents, advocates, and legislators as federal, state, and district laws/policies evolve.
School psychologists in today's schools have the unique opportunity—and responsibility—to guide identification for gifted programs. “Who is gifted?” remains a perennial question in the gifted education literature, not answered by group intelligence screeners that purportedly level the playing field for all. As the student body grows more diverse, there is increasing necessity to ensure that all students have equal access to gifted programs. Failure to identify and develop the advanced abilities of gifted children who are culturally diverse, economically deprived, highly gifted, or twice exceptional is justifiably viewed as a civil rights violation. The National Association for Gifted Children's 2018 position statement, “Use of the WISC‐V for Gifted and Twice Exceptional Identification,” offers important considerations for identifying the gifted. Based on a national research study of 390 gifted children on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition (WISC‐V), the statement recommends that the traditional practice of mandating Full Scale intelligence quotient scores be abandoned. Instead, it embraces the use of any one of six expanded index scores that are better measures of abstract reasoning for selecting students for gifted provisions. As gifted children are oftentimes asynchronous, alternate index scores are less biased and better able to document the strengths of all gifted children. What is learned from the WISC‐V can be applied by school psychologists to improve the choice of comprehensive individual intelligence tests, brief intelligence tests, and the body of evidence gifted children must exhibit.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.