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Cricket,
Did they tell you what the questions entailed, regardless of who was supposed to obtain consent?

No, The man at ACT's ESTS (Elementary Student Talent Search) division told me that the survey wasn't their "intellectual property" and, as such, they couldn't get me any info about the content. He said that the survey was designed and implemented by the respective talent searches (WATS, C-MITES, NUMATS, etc.). The talent search region left me with the opposite impression -- that they weren't the ones who designed the survey or requested its administration.

Speaking of which--any idea when the scores start to come in? Dd keeps asking!

Deacongirl, I believe the scores come at the very end of March.

I spoke with the director of my talent search. She was very informative and helpful, and I would encourage anyone who has a question about the survey portion of the Explore test to call and ask to speak with their talent search director. I think speaking by phone is the most useful, as for this sort of thing it can be better medium for communication, and helps avoid misunderstandings, etc.

She indicated that the various talent searches created the survey some time ago and it is changed every few years, based on input from the talent searches. ACT only administers the survey. She agreed that there should be transparency in the process, and listened to my concerns.

The heads of the talent searches are probably meeting in May. I am satisfied with what she told me, although I am quite curious to see what the resolution will be.

After seeing this thread I asked my 4th grader about the survey yesterday. He remembered it from January, but the question that was most top-of-mind for him was "race". He's never been asked that before, so it really got him wondering why they cared. Also, he's mixed race and didn't know what to answer. He told me he was worried someone might want the info to stalk him (too many Internet safety conversations, I guess) so he left it blank. How's that for a great way to kick off a testing session! Poor kid. I'm guessing it was a new question since he took it last year, too, but made it seem like this year was the first time he was asked his race.

To all who have participated in this discussion regarding talent search and the �survey�

My name is Susan Assouline and I am the associate director of The University of Iowa Belin-Blank Center. Ann Shoplik (C-MITES Director) and I were the first to use EXPLORE as a talent search instrument, thus were one of the original founders of the Elementary Student Talent Search (ESTS). Because the Belin-Blank Center and ACT are both in Iowa City � and also share a history � I�ve worked closely with them over the past 20 years, and �d like to provide a bit of history and also clear up some misconceptions.

History: The very first elementary student talent search (ESTS) was conducted in Jan 1993. At that time, ACT informed the Belin-Blank Center that each answer sheet for EXPLORE had 12 blank items � called Local Items, because they are developed locally � and that the Belin-Blank Center could develop 12 short-item questions, which would be administered prior to the actual 4 EXPLORE tests. We did so. Now, this was in 1993, and the information about human subjects, IRB, etc., was much less formal than it is now. However, I assure you, this was not a personality test. The original items were along the lines of: How much do you like school; how much do you like math; how much do you like Language Arts, etc., etc., etc. What do we learn:
In general, bright children love school, but their �love� diminishes a bit as their grade level increases. Children love math and science . . . they do not like language arts.

We found this information to be very useful in program planning.

Shortly after 1993, other talent search organizations opted to also use EXPLORE. Those directors can give you additional history about their organizations. Over the years, those 12 local items have changed � perhaps 4 or 5 times. The changes have been based upon the interests of the various talent search organizations and involve many compromises. A few years back, we wanted to know the most common ways in which students studied various subjects. My colleague, Ann Shoplik, and I obtained permission from the other talent search organizations to have ACT generate the frequency distribution of the one local item that asked about the ways in which students study math because we used that information in our book, Developing Math Talent, relative to information about programming. BTW � 50% of talent search participants study math in the regular classroom setting. Think about the implications of students at the 95th percentile � or above � on grade-level tests studying math in the regular classroom. However, other than reporting this percentage as it pertains to programming (you don�t need IRB approval for collecting data related to programming), we have not reported any other statistics, because we do not have IRB permission.

You may be wondering why we haven�t published anything about the local items recently .. . in fact one parent said, � It seems to me that our kids were used as part of someone's psych experiment . . . .
However, that is not the case; primarily, we have not � because no one has permission from their respective IRBs -- analyzed or published any analyses. The University of Iowa is working on getting IRB approval for the students who register for ESTS through the UI. But we do not have permission. Until we get permission, we cannot even look at the frequencies of responses . . . let alone write it up . . .

Speaking of IRB, I want to share the reality of university IRB system. I have been working with the research dept at ACT to �hopefully � conduct a small study with 200 students who will be part of a special testing in Iowa in March. I submitted the IRB proposal on Jan 21. Preparing the IRB is no small task. After receiving the IRB proposal, I received 23 questions that required responses. I responded. After responding to those 23, I received 14 more queries. After responding to those � keep in mind that there are usually several days between queries and response � I received 6 more. Finally, I got permission � two months after submitting the proposal, only to be told by ACT, that the proposed study could not be conducted using the procedure. That means that the original consent form, which had specified a specific procedure for distribution of the survey,will need modification. So, it's back to IRB . . .

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.

This message is already too long, so I will post another response regarding some of the other concerns mentioned in this discussion.

For those of you who read this entire message, thank you.

This is my thinking and I do not have the endorsement of any of the other talent search organizations for any of the content above.

This item is PURELY an item that is from ACT. It is part of the standard answer sheet.

Dr. Assouline, While I do appreciate your response on this thread, I am not comfortable with the IRB explanation you gave. I understand that IRB processes are cumbersome. That is not a reasonable explanation for simply not seeking IRB approval for me.

While I do have some familiarity with IRB and am researching more, I do also want to clarify something related to your post. You stated that you have not published statistics from the local items survey b/c you did not get IRB approval. Are you saying that informed consent of parents and IRB approval is only necessary if you plan on publishing results from your survey?

I admit that I may be wrong, but that was not my understanding of IC/IRB. I had thought that IC and IRB approval was necessary to conduct a human subjects experiment (including surveying children on their beliefs about intelligence, etc.) not just if you want to use the results of the experiment for publication.

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

That and your longer note about what is entailed in getting IRB approval:



I know it's a huge process. That doesn't mean that you don't have to do it.

I guess that I've just never seen it done this way -- research conducted prior to obtaining IRB and then seeking IRB after the fact. I recognize that there is a semantics issue here in that you are not terming it research, but we as parents (or at least I, as a parent) do feel like these questions were research into our children's psychological beliefs regarding fixed versus malleable intelligence.

I'll have to look back at the forms we filled out to register our children for talent search, but I do not recall there being any consent forms in there at all. Consent forms generally entail a full explanation of what your children will be doing and the talent search registration forms do not note anything about surveys of beliefs. That's like saying that us filling out school registration forms is the same as filling out a consent form to survey our children on similar items to what they were asked on the EXPLORE.