Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment EXPLORE Prep?

I can't see how answers to these survey questions would help them plan any kind of program for our students.

I don't want to blow it out of proportion, but it just seems so very wrong to me for several reasons...

Glad I saw this. I just asked DS9 who took the Jan. date, and he said there was a survey before that asked questions about what he is good at. Upon a little more questioning, he said it asked things such as are you more gifted in x vs. y (what someone else posted).

He doesn't stress out over testing, but regardless, I am pretty surprised they didn't get consent. This doesn't sound like an "interests" survey to me. I'm looking forward to hearing from Herenow after she gets some further information. What is interesting is that this seems to be included with all the Explore test sites, not just one individual talent search.

Cat

I would like to know what exactly the questions were and how they were worded, and what are they going to be used for. I would have been much less bothered if it had been completed after the Explore test rather than before the test. My DD appears to have keyed into the word intelligence on the survey too. I'm looking forward to hearing the response since this sounds more like something done for Explore itself if it was done with different talent search groups.

But if they had done it after the test then the their survey would have been biased by the experience of having taken the Explore, instead of having the test be biased by their survey. You wouldn't want that would you ...

I'm also surprised they'd do that, especially sneaking it in without informing anyone. DD took it last month and I'll ask her about it.

My dd was, honestly, sick on the day of the EXPLORE so I'm not expecting her best performance. She had an upset stomach and headache, but we figured that we'd give it a try since it was the last test date and there wasn't anything specific going on other than her saying that she didn't feel well. By the time I picked her up, she had a temperature, though.

That aside, she did confirm that they were asked similar questions. The one she remembered was, "you can change your intelligence: strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree." She said that there were a number of questions using a likert scale that dealt with a fixed vs. growth model of intelligence (she didn't word it that way ). I send an e-mail to WATS/CBK, our talent search, to ask them to look into this since no informed consent was gathered.

I think I found what you might have read. On the EXPLORE website it mentions that the students would take a "72 item interests inventory about the types of work tasks you would or would not like to do".

That is not what our kids were given. The questionnaire our kids took had maybe 8 questions on intelligence and whether is is fluid or fixed, all exactly as Cricket2 described. They were all variations on a theme. For example I think they went something like this:

Intelligence can be changed if you work hard
1agree 2 3 4 5 disagree

No matter how hard someone works they can't change their intelligence.
1 agree 2 3 4 5 disagree

And so on for several more questions. The children were told "there are no wrong answers, just your opinion". The end of the questionnaire had a few more questions; I don't know what they were. The questionnaires at our site were sitting on the tables when the children walked into the room. They were told not to fill them out until instructed.

I will be very surprised if this isn't going into someone's psych study. Without our consent. While possibly affecting our kids scores/perception of testing. And we PAID for this.

I am curious whether they gave this questionnaire to the 8th graders who take this test. Or was it just given to the Gifted kids?

Better go take a walk and cool off...

The one question that my DD thought she remembered clearly (tested last month, just asked her last night) was along the lines of "are you better at math/science or at reading/english", with some kind of option of saying equal. If she is remembering right, then that is a bit annoying since you could be causing the kid to focus on "I'm not as good at math" or something like that right before the test.

When my oldest took Explore through our talent search (not NUMATS), we had to check a box saying we would allow a survey to be given regarding academic interests. I don't recall the exact wording. I would think if NUMATS asked you when you signed up, that would constitute consent. If not, I agree that's wrong.

Historically, the talent searches grew out of social psychologists trying to study gifted kids. As I understand it, that was Julian Stanley's original mission at JHU. The head of our talent search is a psychology professor, and has published quite a bit of research from the data gathered through the talent search.

Hopefully, this research will help educators understand our kids. I'm all for it. I agree consent is an issue.

My dd12 is an 8th grader and took the EXPLORE at her school "for real" this past October. She wasn't given a survey of that sort.

Hmmmm...Interesting....My ds10 took the EXPLORE February 19th. He never mentioned a pretest "survey" of any type until I asked him just now. He said there were about eight questions asking what special gifted classes he was taking, how he felt about taking the test, what reason was he taking the test...He did do the practic questions they sent. On the practice test he felt math was the hardest and the science pretty easy, but on the actual test he said math was much easier than the practice test questions and that the science was much harder....Go figure