Thanks for the opportunity to clarify. I'm not sure what you are referring to in terms of an IRB explanation. Did you mean my comment: "Now, given all of the above information, I want to say that we really do respect all of the concerns and fully recognize that times have changed and there needs to be more transparency. We will be working towards this. I regret that the time it takes for universities to �act� is so unbelievably long."

If so, then please recognize that my phrase: "we will be working toward this" is exactly what I believe you are suggesting: we will be obtaining IRB.

Thanks for asking for clarification about publication of statistics, etc., and specifically for the question:
"informed consent of parents and IRB approval is only necessary if you plan on publishing results from your survey"

When parents register their child for the talent search testing, they provide consent. We made an assumption that the consent was for the entire testing process, which in my mind, included the local items. There was no malice intended in this. However, when some parents brought this to our attention, we recognized that this needs to be remedied, thus, we have filed IRB proposals retroactively.

So, you please understand: you did consent. However, because there is confusion about what was actually consented to, we cannot conduct research until IRB approves a proposal.

So, please understand, the clarity needs to be with respect to the talent search program. The talent search program is NOT an experiment. It is a program and parents consent to it prior to registering their child. We now recognize that we need to fully disclose the information related to the local items (my discussion of the history of this was intended to reveal to you that this was never intended to be an experiment or a intelligence test or personality test).

If any researchers from the talent search organizations are interested in looking at these results, they can only do so with IRB permission.

I hope that clarifies -- I do appreciate any requests to provide clarity to my comments.

Susan Assouline