If we can all agree that gifted is a person who is in the top few percentiles in terms of ability, then the schools that identify 15-25%+ of their kids as gifted (all of my local schools do this) are obviously identifying more kids as gifted than are actually gifted. ...most or all of the parents whose kids are in these TAG classes believe that their kids are very gifted. Some of the parents whose kids aren't in TAG also believe that their kids are gifted; maybe some of them are since our TAG programs seem to grab the high achievers more than the underachieving gifted kids. If 20%+ of my local parents believe that they have gifted kids, some of them are obviously not good at accurately identifying their kids as gifted, IMHO.
You could also look at the parents' mistaken beliefs another way. The schools say that as many as 25% of kids are gifted. This would correspond to an IQ at the 75th percentile, or ~110. This is pretty close to the mean of 100, and another 25% of kids will fit into the range between 100 and 110.
So if you look at it this way, and especially if the schools are using academic achievement to measure "giftedness," it's completely reasonable for up to half of parents to believe that their kids are gifted.
So, it's not that the parents aren't good at identifying giftedness accurately. It actually sounds to me like they're making reasonable judgments
using the definitions given to them. So this means that the problem is actually that the schools are using improper definitions of giftedness.
Just my 2c.
Val
