My 4th grade twins just received invitations to our state awards ceremony based on their Explore scores. This is a first time experience for us and I would appreciate any input from experienced parents here on what these ceremonies are like? Did your child get much out of attending? Attending the ceremony is not a hardship for us as it happens to be ~2 miles from our house and at a time with no conflicts for us. However, I was surprised from the invites that the ceremony duration is *2 hours*, followed by a reception. My 10 year olds have squirminess as well as intellectual gifts, and I am concerned whether this ceremony will be engaging enough to keep their attention for two hours. Also, I am deeply conflicted about the whole concept of an "awards ceremony" for this.... I am guessing the primary benefit may be contacts with other kids and/or programs at the reception, but fear that after two hours sitting still, my kids will just rush for the sugar and start bouncing off the walls.

Also, I notice that NUMATS now have criteria posted for recognition at their awards ceremony. Although we have not received an invitation yet, it is clear that dd meets their criterion based on her Explore scores. Thus, the same questions apply for that one. The NUMATS ceremony would be a hike for us, so it is more unlikely we would go (especially since ds barely missed the criterion) unless there was a compelling reason.

Thanks for your input!!

I'm also curious about this. We're leaning toward going to the Wisconsin one for DD, but I'm (perhaps wrongly) assuming that they don't really fill the whole 2 hours with handing out medals.

Hi,
We went to the DukeTIP awards ceremony last year and it took forever to hand out the awards. They had a small group of Explore kids with a large group of SAT/ACT kids from 7th grade. The speaker was good but there was a lot of sitting and waiting.
Even though it was a 2 hr drive I still felt like it was worth it because my child attended a small rural school and got to see that there are other kids like her, just not at her school.
Hope that helps.
Wendy

When dd11 went to the RMATS awards ceremony for her 4th grade Explore scores, it too was two hours long, but I don't recall the kids having to sit still for the whole two hours. At the start, there were tables set up with groups offering information on their services for GT kids. DYS was there as I recall. We wandered around and picked up various flyers. After that stuff wrapped up, the kids all sat in the center of an auditorium on chairs and the family members sat in the bleachers. They called the kids up and read off their names and hung medals around their necks & then people mingled a bit at the end.

We will probably be attending again this year although it is an hour from home and the official emails won't be out until next week. I am pretty sure that dd will get in with her 7th grade SAT scores since all they are requiring is a score in the top 25% of the region for her grade -- not a specific cut-off like some of the other talent searches. Looking at the TIP percentiles they have posted online, dd would be in the top 10% in CR and writing for their group, so I assume that she'll at least make top 25 here.

For dd, I felt that it wasn't as often that she had an opportunity to be honored for doing well on things like athletes do, for instance, and it was nice for her to get recognition for her gifts.

eta: I forgot about the speakers that the pp mentioned. Yes, that was some extra sitting time, too, before the medals were handed out.

D14 had a wonderful experience at our state ceremony last year. She had the top score in one of the categories, and the woman handing out the medals happened to have administered the Stanford-Binet to her at age 4. D, of course, had no clue who this woman was. But when she gave D her medal, this woman recognized her name. She quietly said a few words to her about having tested her, and remembering D's great potential, and how exciting it was to see her succeed all these year's later. D said later that it felt a bit like Harry Potter finding out that people knew who he was. It made her week, that is for sure. She did ask on the way home if her Hogwarts letter would be arriving soon

She also went to the NUMATS ceremony (a top 3 finisher, so maybe worth it because of the extra recognition), but her dad took her, so I am not sure about the format for that. They happened to be traveling through Chicago that weekend, so it worked out for them.

For us these have been worth going to over the years (esp. the state one) because it pretty infrequent that our kids get true applause from a crowd for being gifted. My D has been very proud of her accomplishments in NUMATS, and we have enjoyed celebrating them with her.

Regrets...I've had a few...

I'll stop singing. We didn't go and now that they no longer hold award ceremonies in my state (because of poor attendance & low participation), I do regret not going. That probably won't happen in your states, but I would go once and then not feel like I had to go year after year.

DS9 just received his notice for NUMATS Chicago ceremony today. We think it will be a great experience for him. Even though it is a 6 hour drive, we are going to make a weekend out of it. He's excited and we are excited for him. I figure it'll be similar to a graduation type ceremony. It'll be a good time.

Thanks everyone for the input. Dd just also received her invitation for the NUMATS ceremony. I think what I'll do is tell the twins that they have been invited to the state ceremony and let them choose whether to attend or not. Since dd made the cut for the NUMATS ceremony and ds did not, I think we'll definitely skip that one.

I still feel uncomfortable about attending -- it would be one thing if the ceremony involved achievement based on significant effort on their part. But in this case all they did was show up for a test I signed them up for. It wasn't even their idea. I fear that making a big deal out of it will some how send the wrong message about our expectations for them. So when I ask if they want to go, I guess I'll be up front about that.

That's honestly the case here too. I guess that I didn't think about it that way b/c some of the kids who get accolades for their athletic achievement, for instance, didn't necessarily work super hard to achieve that well. They may just be fast runners who get ribbons at school for being the first place runner at field day.

You do bring up an interesting point, though, b/c I am interested in stressing work ethic more than just being "smart" with no effort. We'll be hearing tomorrow, I believe, via email if dds made the WATS awards.

I view these things a little differently.

I see so few things out there that recognise the achievements of gifted children that when something like this does come along to me it symbolises the culmination of all the unseen and unrecognised effort. I understand where you are coming from and if my children receive awards like this, that is usually the angle I address it from, the cumulative rather than the single.

Go to the ceremony, enjoy and have fun!

That's the only thing I remember about going when I was a kid: getting the scoop on the other kids from my hometown who were invited.

You're not the only one Dottie! I will be very interested to see the list.

And, yes, it does seem a VERY long time to wait.

Why the interest in knowing who else was invited?

You mean, aside from my insatiable desire to know everything? I actually made some friends I wouldn't have otherwise because they were different ages/in different grades/in different schools. When you're in a secret club, it's nice to know a few other people who are in it too.

Seems reasonable. We generally know who else was testing locally and it seems to be mostly the same group of kids from year to year. (All Explore & SAT testing takes place at our local uni, so you see the other kids.) Some of these kids spend months prepping for the test, so it didn't necessarily occur to me that they would be good friends for dds in that they are coming from a different place on this and dds don't usually do as well with kids from high pressured competitive environments. I know that dd11 did see some kids from her middle school this year who she wouldn't have known were involved in talent search otherwise, though. Of course, they were icky boys, so they are unlikely to be new buddies -- lol!

Well, I have to admit that I am quite disappointed on dd11's behalf. WATS said that all invites for the Colorado awards ceremony would be emailed by the end of the day today & when I spoke with the director down there a while back about something else, she told me to expect that dd would be in with her SAT scores being what they were. I know that different talent search regions have different scores, but dd's CR and writing scores were in the top 10% of Duke's region, so I also assumed that they would be in the top 25% of ours. In any case, no email, so I can only assume that she didn't make it.

Cricket, I have to second what Dottie said. Maybe WATS is just running a little behind. The director there is very, very nice. It won't hurt if you send her an email to see if the invites got out on time. She is very good at replying emails.

No, actually I emailed to ask after I posted and they emailed back that her scores didn't qualify in the top 25%. I'm waiting for the interpretive guide to see what our local 7th grade scores look like! We must either have a lot of really bright kids in our local talent search or a lot of kids who really studied hard.

I feel bad for dd, though, b/c this has been a disappointing week for her already. She had applied for a scholarship through NSGT hoping to get partial funding for an educational tour of Italy with a school group next year. (Dds are 5/8th Italian & dd11 really wants to study Italian at some point.) She had a pretty good application in that she had a strong letter of recommendation, her desire to study the Italian language and culture is written into her ALP (which we enclosed), etc. She found out a few days ago that she didn't get the scholarship, so she's not going to be able to make the trip.

I'll have to let her know about the awards when I pick her up from a school program later. She was expecting to be in based upon the comments from the director of CBK & how her scores stacked up in other regions. I'll just have to be more tight lipped next year if she tests again so I don't get her hopes up! Gosh, her CR score more than qualifies for the 8th-11th grade program for CBK, so I thought that I was safe in telling her that she was likely to be getting an award.

So, how do you think that they are figuring those percentiles?

I may be really dense at math, but I was assuming that if you had a group of say 100 kids, that 25 of them would be in the top 25 percent even if numbers 1-10 got scores of 700+ for instance. Kids #11-15 could have scores more in the 500 range and they'd still be above the other 75 kids regardless of how they compared to the amazing scoring kids.

Is this not how the top 25% is figured?

I don't know anything about WATS so this may not apply here, but at least some ceremonies like Duke's are based on a percentile against standard test norms (meaning Jr/Sr in HS for the SAT) instead of the talent search norms (meaning the GT 7th graders).

Well, I got curious and assuming I found the right page it sounds like they are using their search for the norm.


Another good idea slain by an ugly fact. It does seem odd that the norms for that search are so different.

Yes, they do look at the top 25% of their region for each year so the numbers may change quite a bit from year to year. I actually thought that the top 25% would be lower this year b/c WATS lowered the bar to do the testing (90th percentile on the grade level achievement test rather than 95th in years past).

There are some regions for which dd would easily be in (TIP, for instance) and there appear to be others where the guidelines for awards are so restrictive that only a few kids get in out of hundreds or maybe thousands (like NUMATS). Honestly, it isn't the end of the world. I just thought that she did well and am surprised that so many other kids did so much better and I'm also disappointed for her b/c she was expecting to get an award.

eta: CBK/WATS doesn't break down their data to the extent that Duke/TIP does & they haven't posted the data for this year yet, but in looking at last year's interpretive guide, 41% of their 7th graders scored at or above a 500 on CR (4% at 600-690 and 37% at 500-590). I have no idea how many of those kids in the 500-590 range were at the upper or lower end of that range. I was actually thinking that her writing score was the one that was a shoo in even though it was lower than her CR score in that it seems like more kids score poorly on the writing portion & it wasn't included in awards last year.

CTY's awards page says that "About 25% of 7th and 8th graders and 33% of 2nd through 6th graders who test qualify to attend Awards Ceremonies." That does sound like their pool is similar to WATS then.

For WATS? I have no idea. They don't post their awards eligibility just the interpretive guide I linked above. If your child is in the top 25%, you get an invite, but you don't hear how far into that top 25 s/he was.

I'm going to drop this at this point in that I don't want to linger on it. It is what it is.

Cricket2 -
Your talent search area has very small numbers, so a few high scorers will skew the results. CBK has hundreds of kids take the SAT/ACT, while JHU and TIP have 60,000 to 70,000 kids. Your DD should be proud of herself for giving up a Saturday morning to take the test.

I found a comment on one of the state award ceremonies sites that I thought was interesting. The number of kids that get awards is based on the size of the room they can get for the ceremony. So I guess it ends up being a curve for practical reasons. Looking at their scores cut-off they had a higher cut-off for the state awards than the regional award ceremony. ... must not have had access to a big enough room that year. Anyway it is a hard lesson to learn as a kid. It is great when you win something, but there are always factors outside your control that can affect winning so you can't take not-'winning' to personally either.

Yeah, I got the interpretive guide via email today. I do wish that they'd break it down moreso than x percent of 7th graders scored within this 100 point range. In any case, only about 100 7th graders tested through WATS on the SAT this year. 52% of them got a 500+ on CR and 41% got a 500+ on writing. My guess is that she was pretty close, but not quite there. Her CR, writing scores & composite scores were still well above the mean for her grade and CR & writing were somewhat above the mean for 8th grade as well.

We attended the WCATY (Wisconsin) ceremony on Saturday. They had some speeches from organization and university people followed by handing out the medals by grade, with student talent performances (various musical instruments, a dance, an oratory, some sketches, etc) mixed in throughout. I thought the student talent exhibitions were a nice way to keep things from becoming monotonous, but I would have been happier if they'd kept the speech-making part to an absolute minimum. It ran a bit longer than the 2 hours scheduled, and by the end lots of people were leaving. DD enjoyed it overall though, and I don't regret going, so I don't mean to be too critical.