Eight Universal Truths of Identifying Students for Advanced Academic Interventions

Applying Automated Originality Scoring to the Verbal Form of Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking

“…Therefore, the methods (i.e., the text-mining model and corpora) used in the present study are likely to be useful for children’s data, as well. Fourth, performance on TTCT-Verbal may be influenced by verbal skills of the students and this may penalize students with lower vocabulary or literacy skills unless the obtained automated scores are pooled by sociodemographic characteristics (Lee et al, 2020). Alternatively, it would be safe to use instruments such as verbal measures of cognitive ability (e.g., the verbal battery of the Cognitive Abilities Test) to control for this confounding effect of verbal skills before making high-stakes decisions.…”

“…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 (Lee et al, 2020; Peters et al, 2020). Given the representation discrepancy in gifted identification by race (Grissom & Redding, 2016), English-language learner status (Mun et al, 2020) 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.…”

Identification Policy: Addressing Equity and Excellence for Advanced Learners

“…Often, gifted identification policy requires local education agencies to use multiple sources of data, which may include teacher referrals and high scores on cognitive ability tests. These two-phase procedures (e.g., nominate then screen) can function as gatekeepers and limit access to gifted services for many students with advanced learning needs (NAGC, 2019, Standard 2.3.1; Lee et al, 2020; Plucker & Peters, 2016). Universal screening is a process that evaluates all students in a grade level to identify those who could benefit from advanced coursework (NAGC, 2019, Standard 2.1.3; Peters et al, 2020).…”

“…Many identification policies require schools to use national norms to determine eligibility for gifted and talented services. Instead of comparing students to their highest performing peers across the country (e.g., national norms), which may mean some lower performing or under-resourced schools identify very few students or none at all, local norms can be used to compare students within a school district or on a campus to identify those who need additional academic challenge they are not already receiving (Lee et al, 2020; Peters et al, 2021). Building-level local norms allow each campus to identify the students in that school who are most in need of advanced academic coursework and to provide those students with appropriate academic challenges (NAGC, 2019, Standard 2.3.1; Plucker & Peters, 2016).…”

“…Policies should address the alignment between identification practices and programming (Callahan et al, 2022; Lee et al, 2020). For example, if students are identified using nonverbal assessments, it would be illogical to provide services in advanced humanities courses that rely heavily on verbal skills to engage with the course content and demonstrate mastery.…”