Gifted - Minority Students Who Are Gifted in America

Minority Students Who Are Gifted in America

While white students represent the majority of students enrolled in gifted programs, Black and Hispanic students constitute a percentage less than their enrollment in school. For example, statistics from 1993 indicate that in the U.S., Black students represented 16.2% of public school students, but only constituted 8.4% of students enrolled in gifted education programs. Similarly, while Hispanic students represented 9% of public school students, these students only represented 4.7% of those identified as gifted. However, Asian students make up only 3.6% of the student body, yet constitute 14% in the gifted programs.

In their 2004 study, “Addressing the Achievement Gap Between Minority and Nonminority Children by Increasing Access to Gifted Programs” Olszewski-Kubilius et al. write that minority students are “less likely to be nominated by teachers as potential candidates for gifted programs and, if nominated, are less likely to be selected for the program, particularly when such traditional measures as I.Q. and achievement tests are used for identification.”

This underrepresentation of such students gifted programs is attributed to a multiplicity of factors including cultural bias of testing procedures, selective referrals and educator bias, and a reliance on deficit-based paradigms. To address the inequities in assessment procedures, researchers suggest the use of multiple tests and alternative methods of testing, such as performance-based assessment measures (based on Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences) oral-expressiveness measures as well as non-verbal ability assessments (such as Naglieri Nonverbal Abilities Tests (NNAT) or Raven’s Matrix Analogies Tests.

Gifted students of color experience success when multicultural content is incorporated in the curriculum and furthermore when the curriculum itself is designed to be culturally and linguistically compatible. A culturally diverse curriculum and instruction encourages gifted minority students to experience a sense of belonging and validation as scholars. Furthermore, the educator's role in this process is significant as Lee et al. argue that "eacher awareness and understanding of students' racial and cultural differences and their ability to incorporate multicultural perspectives into curricular content and instructional techniques may counter gifted minority students' discomfort in being one of the few minority students in gifted programs.”