Do Students in Gifted Programs Perform Better? Linking Gifted Program Participation to Achievement and Nonachievement Outcomes

Abstract

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.

Examining Gifted Students' Evaluations of Their Education Programs in Terms of Their Project Production and Management

“…The results of this research that was given the opportunity to do an implemented program to the gifted students which are aimed for developing the projects can be considered by other gifted centers. In addition, this research differs from the other researches (Hertzog, 2003 ; Cho and Lee, 2006 ; Gavin et al, 2009 ; Al–zoubi and Rahman, 2015 ; Redding and Grissom, 2021 ) in terms of evaluating the impact of a program from the students' projects productions.…”

Where Does Gifted Education Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

“…Nothing could be further from the truth. Due to the current and longstanding inequity in the populations of students identified as gifted and talented (something I have written on in Peters and Carter (2021) and , and also highlighted in 2022 by Young and Young (2022)), and the fact that this inequity appears to co-occur with little in terms of educational benefits for the students who do end up being served by gifted programs (Adelson et al, 2012;Card & Giuliano, 2016;Redding & Grissom, 2021), I would end the designation of students as gifted tomorrow. Although there are exceptions that should see far-greater use in K-12 schools (e.g., grade acceleration), too many gifted programs are both ineffective and inequitable.…”

“…Engel et al (2012) documented that despite nearuniversal mastery among kindergarteners of things like counting to 10 and recognizing geometric shapes, teachers still reported spending 13 days per month re-teaching this content! Studies of gifted education with nationally representative samples have documented null effects on academic achievement (Adelson et al, 2012;Redding & Grissom, 2021), although it is important to emphasize that in being nationally representative, the researchers could not tease out exactly what services, if any, the students received. In the United States, advanced learning does not appear to be a priority-even less in the COVID-19 era (Haderlein et al, 2021)-and on average (and this is important since there are excellent gifted programs), typical gifted-specific programs appear to be effective at little aside from separating students based on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.…”

Expanding Gifted Identification to Capture Academically Advanced, Low-Income, or Other Disadvantaged Students: The Case of Arkansas

“…By expanding identification procedures to more universally capture students who have high developed talents in mathematical and verbal symbol systems that are important to school as currently structured (Lohman, 2005a), this is relatively low hanging fruit given that state assessments are already often universally provided and such data can be leveraged as part of the GT identification process, no matter the specific requirements of the state policy. Additionally, gifted education needs better alignment between identification procedures, programming offered based on identification (Lakin, in press), and progrm evaluation (Plucker & Callahan, 2020; Redding & Grissom, 2021; Tran et al, 2021) to demonstrate the importance of such programming to meet academic needs. We illustrate here one way to easily expand the identification process to include talented students from low-income and other disadvantaged backgrounds who are already high achieving and ready to learn something new in schools as they exist today (Stanley, 2000).…”

“…Recent discussions about the effectiveness of gifted program evaluation have centered around math and literacy achievement growth as a measure of GT programming effectiveness (e.g., Redding & Grissom, 2021;Tran et al, 2021); however, expanding consideration to math and literacy in both GT identification and programing may be important in that scholars such as Lohman, 2005aLohman, , 2005bLakin, in press have emphasized better aligning GT identification to actual GT programming provided. Additionally, test scores as outcomes are commonly used in program evaluation and policy research; thus, using these test score outcomes would allow better alignment between gifted education and education policy research and practice.…”