How the Nomination Stage Can Wreck Gifted Identification: A Psychometric Analysis

• In Event: Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: Instrumentation and Identification in Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent

Abstract

Many school districts require that students receive a nomination prior to being eligible for formal testing for gifted identification. The nomination stage can be viewed as an informal screener which limits the time and cost of making placement decisions by reducing the number of students who require formal testing. This paper analyzes the effect of a nomination stage on system performance. We find that nomination cutoffs must be low and nomination validity (and therefore, reliability) must be high in order to avoid extremely deleterious consequences. Data are presented suggesting that nomination stages, as commonly implemented, have low validity and high cutoffs, leading to very poor system performance in which the majority of qualifying students are neither identified nor served.

Authors

• Matthew McBee, East Tennessee State University

• Scott Joseph Peters, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater