Gifted and Talented Program Admissions: Needed Improvements and Reforms
analytical Essay
2216 words
Gifted and Talented Program Admissions: Needed Improvements and Reforms
Gifted and talented programs are intrinsically valuable to many children’s education as they provide a system in which all students involved are engaged, challenged, and intellectually stimulated. In "How People Learn", Donovan, Bransford, and Pellegrino (1999) stress the importance of each student being given reasonable and appropriate goals based on his or her level of understanding and competency (p. 20). Gifted and talented programs help institutionalize the attempt to meet all student’s needs by providing uniquely appropriate challenges which aim to keep every student engaged, thus receiving the best chance at success. Although there are many valuable and important aspects of gifted education, there are also significant issues rooted in the base of America’s gifted and talented programs, one of which I will address throughout this paper. In my opinion, the most notable problem which troubles gifted and talented programs is the system by which students are selected to join their school’s gifted and talented program.
The problem associated with how students are chosen to join a gifted and talented program stems from the way that we define giftedness. Because there are countless ways in which any individual can define talent, the government created a federal task force in 1972 to study gifted education in order to standardize the way in which schools choose students for and implement their gifted and talented programs. The task force’s results are known as the Marland Report and include much information as a result of their research, including a decision that a public school’s gifted and talented programs should aim to serve between 3 and 5 percent o...
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In this essay, the author
- Argues that gifted and talented programs are intrinsically valuable to many children's education as they provide a system in which all students involved are engaged, challenged, and intellectually stimulated.
- Explains that the problem associated with how students are chosen to join a gifted and talented program stems from the way that we define giftedness.
- Explains that the united states congress has slightly altered the definition of giftedness presented in 1972 to remedy the problem that talent was being too narrowly defined.
- Argues that one iq-based test for admittance into a gifted and talented program regulates the system by holding all students to the same standard. laycock was one of the initial researchers who had trouble squaring the idea of using one test with his ideas of how student’s should be selected for talent programs.
- Analyzes how boland discusses the advantages of using multiple criteria for the evaluation of students to reduce the risk of error. baska suggests using the same tests but lowering the standard for acceptance.
- Analyzes laycock's argument that continual testing is good, but no student should be removed from gifted and talented programs based on a poor re-test score.
- Argues that standardized tests are not an intrinsically bad method of evaluating talent, as long as other methods, such as nominations, are used as well.
- Compares birch's study of two academic summer programs, one with an open door acceptance policy, and the other with specific admission requirements, including a recommendation.
- Opines that the most obvious problem which begs for reforms is the system by which students are accepted into these programs. multiple criteria for evaluation, continual testing of students, culturally unbiased tests, nominating processes, and even a partial self-selection process would both increase the diversity of the students involved in such programs
Related
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