Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion % of kids being gifted

I attended a GT information session in my school district recently and was told that my local school is considered a "center" offering complete curriculum to serve gifted students. I was then told that anywhere from 20% to 35% of the kids in the school have qualified and are receiving these services. This seems insane and pointless to me. Is there anyone this is possible? Even in my highly educated affluent suburb?

At the 66th percentile, children should be about 15 IQ above the average. They may be starting there. You would then get your 35%. Ruf thinks that in communities where the parents are generally of above average intelligence, the children will be, hence a higher percentage than the norm.

Ren

They say that the benchmark score is a 132 on any section of the COGAT and/or NNAT to get you in the pool. Then of that pool only about 60% get in. Our second grade class is about 125 students and the smallest number admitted would be around 25 kids. Is it even statistically possible that 63 or roughly half of all second graders are scoring at or abover these levels?

Ok now for the real confession. My dd is an advanced reader and language whiz. We considered private school last year and had her tested with a WISC IV. Her overall was 131 and her verbal was 138 but when I look at the substests she hit the ceiling on a few in the verbal and in the working memory. Since the GT selection seemed pretty random to me I'm starting to worry that she won't qualify. I don't think she'll thrive with the standard curriculum. Any insight on her scores would be great!

Nope just the WISC. I will post her subtest scores this evening. I know she hit the ceiling on the Vocabulary section of the Verbal.

Okay here are the scores:
Block Design - 13
Similarities - 16
Digit Span - 17
Picture Concepts - 15
Coding - 10
Vocabulary - 18
Letter-Number Sequence - 13
Matrix - 14
Comprehension - 15
Symbol - 12

VCI -138
PR - 121
WM - 129
PS - 106
FSIQ - 131


Let me know what you think.

Thank you for the input. I read some of the Ruf material on levels of giftedness and she fits somewhere in between Level III and Level IV. The school will accept outside data I just fear that GT is used as a reward to active connected parents more than a differentiation of students. Hopefully I'm being overly pessismistic. I have signed her up for the CTY Talent search and we will take the SCAT soon, not sure when. We'll see how the NNAT went, she said it was easy but I'm skeptical :-) Any insight out there on CTY or William & Mary?

Hi Ianfan!

I am one of those volunteer parents at school and both my girls will be in the GT classes. But not because I volunteer, because they both qualify based on test scores.

But, I know what you mean about it seeming that a lot of those parent volunteers have kids in the program. What I've seen as a volunteer is that a lot of those parents actually do have kids that really are very, very smart.

We have pull-out enrichment classes starting in K, but I wouldn't call them "gifted" classes. The real classes don't start til 4th. A lot of parents of very gifted children end up getting involved because the early years can sometimes be rough on gifted kids. They want to be IN the school trying to figure out what the HECK is going on!!!!!!!

Welcome,

Neato

I didn't mean to offend helpful parents. It is just that the district policy is give children who are referred by parents and don't have qualifying test scores the same weight as kids who do have qualifying scores. I know that the tests are not perfect but at least they objective, for the most part. Parents are incapable of being objective.

Well...

Parents who honestly believe their kids are GT are correct much more often than not, I think. I'm not talking about the parents who want their kids in the program, GT or not. I guess there are some of those (though I've never met one). But there are far more parents who think their kids are "maybe a little bright" when they're really quite highly GT!

I'm not sure I buy having ONLY the parent recommendation without any other confirmation. That seems a rather sloppy policy. But I don't know that I buy that parents are incapable of objectively IDing kids as GT or not either.

Not to nitpick. But this is something that people often say as if it's fact, and I don't really buy it. I've seen far more parents of GT kids who are in denial than I've seen of the pushy "stage parents" who want their kids to be GT when they aren't. They're apparently all over the place making parents of truly GT kids look bad, but I've never met one before!