Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments How are gifted identified in your schools?

I attended the local school board meeting on Monday night to hear an update on gifted education in my children's district (K-8 only). Our gifted programs start in 3rd grade with a pull-out for math and LA. I, along with board members, was surprised to hear from the director of gifted ed that there is a huge discrepancy in the number of boys vs girls in gifted math across the district -- 75% boys vs 25% girls. There is not a large difference for gifted LA, although girls outweigh boys. I feel like there must be some flaw in their math identification as the girls aren't being recognized. Currently they use a combination of CoGAT administered in 2nd grade (60% weighting), MAP scores (30% weighting) and Renzulli scale completed by the child's teacher (10% weighting).

The director of gifted ed did say that the version of the CoGAT that was used in the past was biased toward boys. Hopefully the new version will not be.

What do your schools use to identify who should be in these classes?

I am curious, if they have the kids taking the MAP then why doesn't that have the higher weighting given that the Cogat is a test that real gifties appear to do consistently less well on?

My experience is from 25 years ago and not in this country but I went to math / science school from 5th-8th grade and there were 6 of us girls and there were 9 of us girls and 21 boys. Huge difference too and we all got into the program based purely on results of math entrance exam. They took in the top 30 kids and that was it. From all our friends kids, I can see how boys are a lot more mathy than the girls, though I'm generalizing here. Math might not be as interesting for a lot of girls so they do not put as much effort into it, perhaps?

as for the original "how are gifted identified" ... I believe our school district uses MAP scores but I might be wrong. At least that's what they used when our oldest was still in elementary.

I also see elementary (majority female) school teachers actively encouraging boys not girls to the point where it makes me sick. More so given the amount of women that act as though women doing worse/having less confidence in Maths in part of some sinister male conspiracy.

I am putting my money on something (Oedipal) that makes the female elementary teachers treat the girls differently which a lot of girls see as disproval for being good at Maths and once this is internalized it is hard to turn around.

In our district they use IQ testing. I don't know if there are any gender differences in #s IDed. DD's magnet started out with equal #s of boys and girls, but now that she is almost aging out, there are significantly more boys than girls. Girls have moved or dropped out and boys have been the ones to replace them. I don't know why.

Our school district uses the RIAS for cognitive, and the OLSAT for achievement in language arts and math. The state leaves the choice of assessment tools to the individual school districts, but it does declare how those assessments are to be used to qualify students for gifted services. These three scores are fed into a matrix as follows:

1.0 - <1.5 SD: 1 point
1.5 - <2.0 SD: 2 points
2.0+ SD: 3 points

ANY of these results will qualify your child for services (1st - 12th grade):

1) 3 points on the RIAS
2) 7 points total combined RIAS/OLSAT Reading/OLSAT Math
3) 6 points as above with further evaluation, to include info from tester on child's attitude related to performance during testing, parental interviews, child interviews, teacher input.

Either way, the services offered are not a one-size variety. They have a program for "cognitively gifted" which amounts to short pull-outs twice a week for enrichment purposes. There are also longer, daily pull-outs for "gifted achievement" in language arts and math.

These services are offered beginning in 1st grade. My DD was also offered some enrichment in K. We opted not to screen her in K, on account of this is what the requirements look like for pre-K to K, and if your child doesn't make the cut, they can't test again for an entire calendar year:

ALL of the below are required:

1) 4 points on the RIAS (2.5+ SDs)
2) 3 points each on math/reading
3) 10 points total

As for the gender breakdown, in my limited interactions with the gifted classes it appears that girls are slightly better represented than boys, at something like 8:7, which lines up nicely with overall population ratios. If I had to guess why they seem to be breaking stereotypes, especially in the gifted math class, I'd suggest that the district is getting to girls before they've experienced enough gender pressure in general classes.

If there's anything to my entirely unscientific observation, it could become a strong argument for pushing services to well before 3rd grade (as if there weren't a ton of good arguments for that already).

My DD9's gifted math teacher is a woman. One project the kids were assigned this year was to research a famous mathematician, and write a report on who they were, and what they did to advance our knowledge. When I heard about it, I immediately started to think about the ancient Greeks and Arabs, but a couple days later DD had been assigned to Mary Pensworth Reagor. I took this as a subtle declaration to DD that, "You WILL have positive female role models."

In another thread I recently said DD has had a couple of awesome teachers... this lady is one of them.

A property of normal distributions is that even small differences in the means of two different normal distributions can produce large differences in the tails. A 3-to-1 sex ratio is not implausible if the gifted math program is very selective. What fraction of students are selected for the gifted math program? Where I live the middle school math team is closest thing to a gifted math program, and the sex ratio of students selected for math meets based on their scores in tryouts exceeds 3 to 1.