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    Also in my state/district program and placement are two different things.


    Our district:
    A child is screened because someone nominates him/her for screening....parent or teacher. Screening is a one on one test with the guidance counselor using a K-BIT 2. If s/he meets the minimum score, at least 2 different teachers fill out some sort of gifted scale, records are reviewed, and a student study team signs off on a psychological assessment request and parent consents. Ideally the assessment would be a wisc and a woodcock Johnson. But they do what they feel like doing. One of my sons got a RIAS and one got a K-ABC-2 instead of WISC and they used an old SAT-10 for my younger son's achievement.

    Anyway that qualifies them to be a part of the gifted program....which is just a label...then you develop what that child needs and finally decide the placement or the how....that child is required to see someone gifted endorsed for some part of the day. So principals try to have one gifted teacher per grade level and then that leads to clustering in that teacher's classroom.


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    I understand that your schools are doing something different than MAP testing (I think you said they are MAP-like). Your schools might even be using something harder than MAP-tests.

    For the MAP (NOT your school's tests), I would say that it is possible to score above 98% without above-grade level instruction or extensive afterschooling.

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    Originally Posted by blackcat
    I suspect there are a lot of kids in gifted programs who have average intelligence but have adults in their lives (in the school or at home), who do a very good job of teaching advanced concepts... I don't think kids should be penalized for not having that.
    On another recent thread hothousing high-achievement was discussed, compared, and contrasted with giftedness. While hot-housed, high-achieving kids may be in some gifted programs, a system of both aptitude and achievement qualification criteria such as you've described in your district may limit that?

    Anecdotally, I'm aware of many gifted kids who far surpass their parents and other family members. They quiz, doodle, theorize, invent, read, research online, visit the library and check out books on the most unlikely topics, ask unending questions, create lists of more questions, and there is no stopping them for lack of large-scale opportunity, mentor, or parent with advanced degree.

    True, while following their own instincts for learning, these kids may accumulate non-traditional, esoteric knowledge and information which is not screened for on achievement tests. Again, this is where a portfolio may be of use.

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    Originally Posted by blackcat
    They haven't even been taught decimals in third grade yet. So how would that work for a child who doesn't know what 55.33 means?
    I find it hard to imagine a gifted third-grader who's never asked and been told what a dot in a number means or what that little 2 up there means, and for a sufficiently gifted child that's all it takes. We have a thermometer at home that measures temperature to 1 decimal place of celsius, for example, and I remember puzzling during the stage when DS (aged two? I'd have to look it up) might still read "18" as "eighty one", about why he'd never make such mistakes with "19.3". Similarly, seeing something sold in m^2 is enough exposure to exponentiation for some. I don't dispute that afterschooling or good differentiation makes it easier for a child to score high on an above level test, but I'm with Sweetie and others: it isn't a necessary condition.


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    Part of our "hothousing" strategy to artificially inflate DS7's achievement score was to provide him with an internet connection and just let him loose on his own to discover what's out there, thereby giving him an unfair advantage over those who didn't have the same opportunity.

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    Originally Posted by blackcat
    The thing is, in order to score 98th+ percentile on achievement tests, you have to be taught above grade-level.

    *Very* quick reply here as I'm in a hurry, but fwiw, I think this must depend on the test. This is just a very quick example for you, but both my EG ds and my MG (if that) dd have been through the same language arts/etc curricula for the past few years. My MG actually is more "successful" at the curricula - she's a talented writer and grammar/etc all come very naturally too her with little effort. She's the kid who after-schools herself in LA activities. DS, otoh, is a total math/science nerd. Yet ds consistently scores up above 98th percentile on LA (reading, verbal, grammar etc) achievement tests that their school uses (nationally normed tests), and dd scores consistently lower. Both of their scores make sense if you look at it relative to their ability scores.

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    My DD took the WJ-III as part of neuropsych testing. I don't think she was able to do problems that were that many years beyond her age - what she was able to do was hard problems that were within the material she had been taught. More steps, more digits, that kind of thing, rather than being able to interpret an integral sign that she had never seen before.

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    Those are still higher criteria than you see for most schools.

    I'm a big proponent of looking at the quality of all of the data - not just cut scores. In blackcat's DD's case, she is clearly earning gifted IQ scores AND achievement scores. She'd be in my program! I think a program that fails to look at all of the data (including the quality of the data and very high scores, not just use a cut score formula), is going to miss some gifted kids that need the program.

    You raise a good point, blackcat - what about children who lack any environmental advantages (and perhaps many environmental DISADVANTAGES)? They might be missed entirely. It would certainly be much more difficult for a child not living in an enriched environment to attain those achievement scores.


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