The Meeting
It is after school and, like many other teachers who might at this very moment be attending a faculty meeting, I find myself in a meeting too. Currently, I imagine, other teachers across the county are probably listening to their principal discuss the latest benchmark testing data or whatever information needs to be passed down from the school board or the superintendent.
My meeting, however, has been called because of a number, and that number is 48.
It strikes me that, on the surface of it, a number is a pretty innocuous thing. But to the lady who sits at the head of the conference table before the twelve of us, it represents quite a lot. It is the sole thing that is keeping her child from being able to participate in certain after school activities; that number is the thing that, in some cases, limits her child's ability to see certain teachers; to this mother, that number represents judgments that our school system has made about her daughter's intelligence, motivation, learning potential, creativity, and perhaps even, her future success.
And it's only off by two. If that 48 had been a 50, we wouldn't even be gathered in this conference room today.
She wraps up her presentation and, I must admit, it has been impressive. She has been eloquent, even-handed, diplomatic. She has also been forceful, descriptive, and prepared. In short, she's been the perfect advocate as she has argued for her daughter's inclusion in the gifted program our county school division offers. As the meeting wraps up, a few of us ask some follow-up questions, and then we thank her for her time and promise a response by the week's end. She leaves the room with a wave of her hand and a smile.
And now it's our turn, the Appeals Committee, to review the all records and data collected six weeks ago. This information, when plugged into a mathematical matrix that ranks and weighs certain elements of that data, resulted in a score of 48. Today we'll consider that number along with the new information and insight that has been offered by the mother. If this committee deems that initial score to be a less than accurate picture of the whole student, we'll either ask for more data (e.g. one more test, perhaps) or we'll immediately identify her as gifted and make available to her those services that our school division offers.
The door has shut softly and we begin our discussion.
***
Contrary to most people's perception, it is not easy to identify an individual as "gifted." Most definitions of giftedness around the country require more than an above average IQ score on a test. Giftedness, most experts would say, is a combination of many above-average personal traits, the intelligence quotient being just one of them. A quick glance at the website for the National Association for Gifted Children, for example, illustrates the diverse ways of defining this amorphous trait. (You can find that site here: http://nagc.org/index.aspx?id=574.)
Look at any of these definitions closely however, and you'll find a large bulk of them have in common at least three elements. Based largely on the work done by educational psychologist Joseph Renzulli (out of the University of Connecticut), those traits used for identifying gifted individuals may be stated using different words or synonyms; they may be illustrated using different examples; but a very large portion of the paradigms used for selecting gifted students in the United States tend to take into account these three traits: above-average ability/intelligence, creativity, and task commitment/motivation.
And therein lies the rub of the matter.
Assessing Element #1: Above-average ability/intelligence. For most school divisions, this component is fairly easy to assess. A series of standardized test scores (for example, the K-BIT, COGAT, WRIT, RIAS, and NNAT-and a host of another similarly titled alphabet soup tests are published and nationally normed) help to determine the individual's overall ability. In some cases, a school division might use an achievement test to select a student as one in need of further challenge. Offer the test, score the results, and voila!-this piece of the puzzle is in place, right?
Not So Fast: A score on a normed test of ability or intelligence does yield a number and, yes, that number does effectively rank that student among those in the normed group ("Congrats! You performed better than 87% of those who took this test!") but that number does not tell the test taker what the division deems to be "above average intelligence." Some school divisions might place that moniker only on those who score in the 98th percentile as measured against the nation or, perhaps, only that district. I have also consulted with school systems who divide their larger district into smaller pieces and demand only that the student score in that range as judged against that one subset of the district. Still other divisions in the U.S. might find that the 98th percentile is too limiting-or, depending on their resources, not limiting enough. And for the child who is transferring from one district to another, it is entirely possible that what was deemed a worthy score or test of ability, achievement (or even a definition of general giftedness) in the previous system may not be deemed so in another.
Furthermore, these tests cost money. If a score is inconsistent from one test to another, most divisions are, at least in spirit, willing to offer an additional test to help clarify the discrepancy. However, today many cash-strapped districts find themselves struggling to find the means by which to offer that child this one final assessment. Similarly, they may face this dilemma if they wish to test a special ed or, perhaps, an ESL student (one whose primary language in the home is one other than English). As stated, there are a myriad number of tests available to assess "above-average-ness"- even for those who struggle with a learning disability or who do not speak English fluently. (The Naglieri is a popular non-verbal ability test, for example.) But these are not free and they must inevitably be weighed against the costs of everything from new textbooks to classroom furniture, salaries, building maintenance, transportation costs, etc.
Finally, it is of course entirely possible that the tests offered simply may not reflect the test taker's ability/intelligence. Everyone has had a bad day. We've woken up late, skipped breakfast to rush to our job (fighting traffic the whole way) and found, upon arriving, that we had left something critical to our day at home. Imagine this same sort of scenario for the elementary or middle school student who slept poorly the night before, rushed out the door, had peer troubles on the bus ride to school, and then was asked to sit and take a "very important" test. Forgivably, this student might not offer her best effort. Similarly, it is conceivable that the test proctor himself or the environment in which that test was offered could inadvertently affect the result. These sorts of irregularities, while hopefully not common, are not impossible.
Assessing Element #2: Creativity. Evaluating creativity might sound a bit like trying to nail Jello to a wall: a messy task at best and one with no clear strategy for its accomplishment. In fact, however, there are some generally agreed upon ways to judge one person's creativity against another's. In essence (and perhaps better, more thoroughly explored in a future blog) an examiner can analyze another's ability to demonstrate four creative thinking skills: fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and originality.
