Diversity Issues And Gifted Education Essay ⋆ Education Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Special educational programs for highly able students are not federally mandated in the United States, so public support for these programs rises and falls over a cycle that historically has peaked every two to three decades. During periods of low support, particularly since the 1970s, criticism of such programs has focused on their alleged elitist nature. Diversity issues have formed the foundation of these critiques, probably because a cursory inspection reveals relatively few students of color participating in programs for the gifted. African American and Latino students, in particular, are underrepresented in gifted education programs in comparison to their presence in the overall school population. In recent years, attention to diversity has broadened to include students from low socioeconomic-status households and students who are English language learners. These students also are generally underrepresented in gifted education settings, in comparison to their prevalence in the overall school population.

Historical Development

Early research concerning academically advanced learners, such as Lewis Terman’s well-known longitudinal study begun in the 1920s, devoted little attention to diversity. By the late 1950s, a small handful of published works considered Black students who had high IQ scores, but this work had little impact. It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that diversity issues began to receive widespread attention in gifted education circles.

Beginning in the early 1970s, following the formal implementation of school desegregation, identifying the academically gifted Black student became a primary focus of diversity-related research in gifted education. Scholars of color such as Mary M. Frasier and Alexinia Y. Baldwin played pivotal roles in these efforts. Scholars during the 1970s also began to devote attention to gifted learners among Native American and Latino populations. Here, too, early efforts focused primarily on identification. More recently, such scholarship has broadened to include recruitment and retention of diverse learners in programs for the gifted, as well as studies seeking to develop appropriate curricula for use with gifted learners.

Since the 1990s, gifted identification procedures have gradually moved away from emphasizing a single-score representation of ability such as IQ. Although IQ scores are still widely used, newer operational definitions of giftedness allow additional information to be used for making placement decisions. These definitions may include criteria that address academic achievement and motivation, as well as related characteristics that are less strongly correlated with IQ, such as creativity and leadership ability.

The use of multiple criteria for identification appears to be having the desired outcome of narrowing the discrepancy in gifted program participation across diverse groups of learners. Because gifted identification policies vary widely from one state to the next, state-level data can offer a promising source of information to investigate the effects of policy on equity and diversity in gifted education.

Legal actions have played a prominent role in recent years. Actual or threatened lawsuits, often based in civil rights law, have driven changes in gifted education policy in some states. Other states have developed policies designed to increase diversity as a proactive measure, in advance of any specific legal challenge.

Emerging Directions

Existing trends seem likely to continue. These include devoting greater attention to equitable representation, movement toward a construct of giftedness that permits identification via multiple criteria, and incorporation of issues of student retention in gifted programs and appropriateness of the curriculum and instruction that such programs provide.

Examination of recent publications in gifted education suggests that researchers’ conceptualizations of diversity are becoming more nuanced. Although early publications may have lumped together all students living in poverty, or all Asian learners, recent scholarship increasingly has emphasized diversity within these broad categories. Narrower descriptions, such as “of [Asian] Indian descent,” are increasingly evident in the literature.

Research designs are becoming more sophisticated as well. Researchers are beginning to apply advanced quantitative methods such as hierarchical linear modeling, and they are increasingly likely to report effect sizes when appropriate. Qualitative and mixed methods research designs add rich detail to the literature. Such scholarship emphasizes the social context of diversity, including peer factors, the school climate, and family and community characteristics that influence achievement among diverse learners.

Bibliography:

Baldwin, A. Y., & Vialle, W. (1999). The many faces of giftedness: Lifting the masks. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Boothe, D., & Stanley, J. C. (Eds.). (2004). In the eyes of the beholder: Critical issues for diversity in gifted education. Waco, TX: Prufrock.
Castellano, J. A., & Díaz, E. I. (Eds.). (2002). Reaching new horizons: Gifted and talented education for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Frasier, M. M. (1997). Multiple criteria: The mandate and the challenge. Roeper Review, 20, A4–A6.

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