Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Classroom Diversity?

Last year our district started identifying kids for "high ability services" according to MAP test results (95% cutoff in either math or reading on the winter test). DD was identified and so we received class placement for this year(3rd grade).
The problem is there are only 8 girls and 21 boys in the class! It is extremely lopsided. Not only are there 21 boys, many of them are foreign born and DD says she has trouble understanding them as well as them understanding the material they've been given (language issues).

A 2nd high ability class that DD mentioned to me does not look like this. That is the class where many of the kids she was formerly in class with last year or year's before went for this year (ie. PTA board members children, etc.).

DH and I had an awful time with the school system last year and I don't want to get into another struggle this year, but this just seems really unusual to me. Also, with so few girls DD is having trouble with the friend issue again.

Why would a principal create such a lopsided classroom? Why not try and spread high ability kids more evenly instead of lumping all the foreign boys and a few girls together? I would expect to see this in college engineering classes but at the elementary level it seems extreme and unusual. And with the makeup of the 2nd class, not even necessary.

I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that the class your DD is in had the higher test results in math. I would not be surprised, from your description, if the other class was more heavily weighted toward hot-housed children and those from influential families--i.e., not quite as high ability, intrinsically. Consequently, more even in academic achievement. Alternatively, this is the high math class, and the other is the high reading class, and those who were high in both were placed according to their higher score. Probably would have the same correlation postulated above.

As you say, a little like the composition of some selective colleges, actually: lots of privileged legacy-type students, and lots of top-tier academic foreign-born or first-generation immigrant students.

Maybe they are considering more than one aspect of the MAP results. If they had high ability groups setup like:
(1) Very High Math
(2) Very High Language
(3) Very High Math + Very High Language

I'd anticipate the sort of configuration you are seeing for a classroom structured for the example group 1 above.

Was your daughter perhaps identified in only Math?

eta: guess a margin too late to say "Jinx"

Some of the "privileged legacy-type students" are also top-tier academic students, since IQ is positively correlated to parental SES. I cited some stats about Harvard in a post at http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....ch_college_and_does_it_m.html#Post195611 .

aeh and Zen, you both concur, so it must be math identification.

My problem is that her 2nd grade teacher sabotaged her reading portion of MAP and her score fell dramatically at the end of the year. She went from 99th percentile down to 90th (being the only one forced to finish a test quickly in a class of wild kids before you have to go home for the day will do that!) . Math increased because the teacher had no influence on that part of the test.

Is class placement really that simple? Which ever score is higher and there you go? I really feel that DD excels in both areas and it would have been clear had it not been for her previous teacher.

Bostonian, thanks for the link, I had not seen it over the summer.

If you use test scores as one factor to group students but also try to balance classes based on sex and national origin, the parents of high-scoring students who did not get into the high-scoring class will object that their children were discriminated against.

If she has other reading MAP test scores that suggest that the winter test was as anomaly (other years, fall or spring scores?), I would mention those to the school. Multiple data points are better than just one. Still, I know our schools "select" a test period to "count," too. I doubt, however, that any of them could keep a straight face while telling you that multiple test periods are not a BETTER measure.

DD's G&T reading and language class was also very boy heavy (orginally, DD was one of 2 girls!). I was very surprised! In retrospect, I think the testing crieria (long process, cut-scores, variety of tests) favors boys, although we often (stereotypically) think of girls as being as strong or stronger in these ares.

I concur that it is probably the high math/higher intrinsic ability group. On the plus side, your daughter will probably get used to the accents over time, and, if the kids are recent immigrants, or non-native speakers, their language ability will skyrocket in just a couple of months (my son went into pre-k practically without speaking any English). Of course, 8 girls is not a lot, but some kids are in classrooms with just 16 kids, say, so also don't have more classmates of the same gender.

Very true.

And, to your other post, yes, SES is correlated with academic achievement. But I think it's fair to say that those who have maximum opportunity to develop their innate gifts (for which we use SES as a proxy) are different from those who do not have maximal opportunity but attain the same achievement, in terms of the remaining ceiling/potential. For the situation named above, alternatively one could consider whether the overselection of male, foreign-born students in the (putatively) high-math group reflects their differential opportunity to develop math talent. That is, the (putatively) high-reading group has not received optimum support for developing math talent (say, due to being educated in the broken North American math pedagogy system), while the foreign-born students have benefited from supplement by parents educated in other, more-effective math instruction systems. The preponderance of males might reflect cultural biases in the home culture towards math and boys.

Of course, we don't really know if the first class is high-math, nor do we know if the second class is high-reading or high-both.

More productively, there might be value in examining the fit of the current ELA instruction with OP's DD. If that is a problem, then perhaps one could start a conversation about re-testing now, or adjusting her placement after the fall MAPs.

BTW, I found some resources that suggest that MAP scores become less accurate with frequent re-administration, due to a reduction in item pool. I suspect that that implies further that the decrease in accuracy may happen more quickly with high-achieving students, since presumably they would use up the top of the item pool more quickly.

shifrbv, as a side question... I went back and read your original post relating to MAP and reading and spoken language. Given the response to accents and your other concerns, have you had a chance to explore a possible auditory processing disorder (APD)?

First question I've seen is: how often has your daughter had ear infections as an infant and toddler?

Possible symptoms: Difficulty with accents, trouble speaking and listening in busy/noisy environments, problem localizing a sound, difficulty coordinating into a conversation, and other factors.

I'm personally familiar with many APD symptoms. Though until I started reading here, I never realized these were likely related to ear infections when I was young and not just overexcitabilities or idiosyncracies.