Teachers See What Ability Scores Cannot

Abstract

Teacher nominations of students are commonly used in gifted and talented identification systems to supplement psychometric measures of reasoning ability. In this study, second grade teachers were requested to nominate approximately one fourth of their students as having high learning potential in the year prior to the students' participation in a randomized control trial of an advanced mathematics curriculum intervention. Treatment students completed researcher-developed unit pretests and posttests intended to measure higher order conceptual mathematical problem solving. Results from multilevel analyses indicate that third grade treatment students who were nominated during second grade significantly outperformed their un-nominated peers on these posttest measures, after controlling for students' composite reasoning scores and pretest scores. This finding supports the view that teachers perceive student qualities beyond cognitive factors that facilitate student success with atypically challenging mathematics content, reinforcing prior recommendations to include teacher nominations as one component of gifted and talented identification systems.This study investigated the relationship between second grade teachers' nomination of students as having high learning potential and students' subsequent performance on assessments of conceptually oriented mathematical problem solving. The data for the study were collected in the context of a large-scale regular classroom curriculum intervention undertaken during the 2009-2010 school year. Although prior studies have addressed multiple aspects of teachers' nomination of students for gifted programming, few have attempted to link these nominations to subsequent student performance in gifted classes or using challenging enrichment-based curricula (McBee, 2006). Of the few studies that have addressed the effectiveness of teacher nominations based on any of the criteria recommended by Renzulli and Delcourt (1986), none have used large national samples or attempted to account for clustering of student outcomes using multilevel models. This study builds on prior work to support the use of teacher nomination as a unique predictor of student success learning from pre-differentiated and enriched curriculum. Unlike the paradigm of isolated self-study underlying Pressey's (1926) and Skinner's (1958) teaching machines, contemporary elementary classrooms more commonly adopt a sociocultural perspective (e.g., Bandura, 1977;Vygotsky, 1978) on the learning process. School environments, whether regular heterogeneous classrooms or special classes for students identified with gifts and talents, are inherently social systems with complex, dynamic interactions between students and their peers and teachers. In such contexts, effective learning is related to many factors beyond a particular student's cognitive reasoning abilities and the quality of the curriculum to be studied. Teachers have a unique perspective from their daily experience within this complex social system that may allow them to id...

Investigating the Initial Psychometric Properties of Brunei Darussalam's Teacher Rating Scale for Identifying Gifted Students

“…As alluded to in the previous section, teacher nomination through teacher rating scales could also provide information that is different and supplemental to existing tests (Borland, 1978;Foreman & Gubbins, 2014 Mathematics, "The student enjoys challenging math puzzles, games, and logic problems." (Renzulli, et.…”

“…If the nomination stage is the "gateway," to gifted education programs, then teachers are the "gatekeepers" (Brighton, Moon, Jarvis, & Hockett, 2007;Ford, Grantham, & Whiting, 2008;Foreman & Gubbins, 2014;Peters, 2009;Rittner, 2009;Wilson, 2014). Teachers are the principle agents for nomination, and teacher nomination is one of the most common procedures used to identify gifted and talented students (Callahan, Moon, & Oh, 2013a, 2013b, 2013cForeman & Gubbins, 2014;McBee, 2006;Neber, 2004).…”

“…A recent study by Foreman and Gubbins (2014) asked teachers to nominate five to seven top performers in mathematical skills. In their analysis, students who had been nominated were also significantly better performers on mathematical problem solving tasks.…”

“…Teachers are the principle agents for nomination, and teacher nomination is one of the most common procedures used to identify gifted and talented students (Callahan, Moon, & Oh, 2013a, 2013b, 2013cForeman & Gubbins, 2014;McBee, 2006;Neber, 2004).…”

“…Carman hypothesizes that personal stereotypic beliefs may lead teachers to be biased in their identification of students. However, because participation in the study was by convenience sampling, generalizability of results may be limited.On the other hand, some research (Borland, 1978;Foreman & Gubbins, 2014;Worrell & Erwin, 2011) has shown that teachers can be effective nominators of gifted students. Borland (1978) evaluated how well teachers identified gifted students if they were provided with a checklist.…”