Serving the Underserved: Giftedness Among Ethnic Minority and Disadvantaged Students.

Gifted children are a minority in themselves, representing only 3 percent of the population. Identifying and serving ethnic minorities and economically disadvantaged youth within this minority poses an added challenge for schools.

Often cultural bias means traditional screening matrices fail to identify potential giftedness in these children and young adults. Worse yet, gifted children with limited English proficiency are misclassified as "slow learners."

Properly serving the needs of ethnic minority and economically disadvantaged gifted youth requires a system that can identify these students and a program that can incorporate their special needs. Sometimes the very things we look for in gifted children, such as advanced vocabulary or an interest in individual projects, are missing in these children because of differences in their cultural and family experiences.

A growing number of school-based programs are making a difference in these students' lives through early identification and intervention, which allows the entire family to help support the intellectual abilities and talents of a child who is gifted.

The most important issues in serving the needs of these children are early identification and enrichment programs, parental involvement in school and home lives, specialized programs geared to me meet the individual needs of these students, and programs developed to help with problem-solving exploration

One crucial issue for site administrators and central-office personnel is teacher education, according to Glynis Rosas, superintendent of Rogers Independent School District, a rural district in central Texas that serves a student population traditionally underserved in gifted programs. "Teacher education is very important because primary teachers seem reluctant to identify children. They must be trained to recognize gifted behaviors," she says.

Through teacher training, Rosas says teachers can identify students who are exhibiting gifted behaviors that may not show up in a testing screen.

An Early Start

Early identification is imperative in dealing with minority gifted students. Studies of the overall effects of home life on the achievement of gifted students are not conclusive, but we know early intervention into their academic lives gives these students a much better chance for success in school.

The Gifted Minority Preschool Program is a system developed in Newark, N.J., to identify gifted preschoolers and provide enrichment through a series of Saturday programs. The program is operated by several agencies, including the Newark Public Schools.

The initial screening, done through a standardized achievement test designed for kindergarten and first grade students, is administered in kindergarten. It identifies about 15 percent of the kindergarten population.

The children then are screened by the Institute for the Study of Child Development at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Brunswick, N.J., which uses age-graded forms. This further narrows the number of children by selecting the top 25 percent. These children are eligible for gifted assessment.

For the gifted assessment component of the program, children are given an individually administered battery that tests overall ability, verbal ability, spatial ability, quantitative ability, and memory skills.

Teachers are trained to work with these identified children within their classrooms to provide further enrichment in addition to the Saturday program. The "Young Thinker" model is introduced through a video and manual made available to teachers. It offers suggestions for facilitating problem-solving and abstract thinking skills

The Pittsburgh Public Schools identifies gifted minorities using a battery of tests, as well as other indicators. The program, using a network of community and educational resources, strives to determine enrichment necessary to nurture giftedness in the district's minority and economically disadvantaged population. District-run workshops for kindergarten teachers focus on altering teachers' traditional expectations of gifted students.

Pittsburgh's program also includes a parent component that teaches parents appropriate ways of helping gifted children develop their potential outside the classroom.

Addressing Culture

The culture of minority students leads to differences in how they deal with peers and adults. In communities where students are first- or second-generation residents of the United States, their native culture plays a strong role in their home life.

Since their behaviors do not incorporate the typical view of a gifted child, these children are sometimes overlooked in screening. Often, these children have language difficulties because of a lack of English education and the fact that another language is spoken exclusively in the home.

Some educators have found ways to incorporate cultural differences into the classroom as an enrichment for all the children. For example, storytelling, music, and visual arts are an ingrained part of many minority cultures. These things can be used to stimulate the creativity of the class as a whole.

Project First Step is a federally funded project in the San Diego City Schools that provides educational opportunities for culturally and linguistically diverse students. The three-year project promotes identification and successful participation of culturally or linguistically diverse gifted students in preschool through second grade.

Dave Hermanson, director of the gifted and talented program in San Diego, says, "The most important issue is that late identification wastes valuable school time and can obscure talents." The San Diego mission statement is based upon the belief that all children must be nurtured through the education system.

The 10 inner-city schools in San Diego's southeast quadrant that make up the project serve Latino, African American, and Indo-Chinese families. The goal is to develop student readiness, teacher training, and parent involvement.

To develop student readiness, educators focus on enhancing thinking processes. Teachers implement Hilda Taba's instructional strategies of brainstorming, concept development, and conflict resolution, which are outlined in her book Thinking for Elementary School Children, and Sydney J. Parnes' creative problem-solving strategies. Parnes, former president of the Creative Education Foundation, is the author of Creativity: Unlocking Human Potential. Ideas are presented in an interdisciplinary setting and are furthered through extracurricular and after-school opportunities.

In developing the teacher training program, teachers in San Diego undergo training that builds upon the training received through the district's gifted and talented program. Using Abraham J. Tannenbaum's enrichment matrix as a framework, the project then encourages teachers to use peer coaching and observation to develop appropriate strategies in their classrooms.

One of the program's central goals is to help teachers develop their ability to observe gifted behaviors. The enrichment matrix, outlined in Tannenbaum's book, Gifted children, is conceptualized as a grid "with the rows denoting content areas and the columns consisting of three sections labeled content adjustment, cognitive processes, and personal and social consequences.

The book further explains, "The task of planning differentiated education involves filling in the cells with a graduated sequence of activities that represent the best thinking and commitment of a duly appointed curriculum committee, not just a single teacher or an informal group of staff members whose ideas stand little chance of becoming official policy."

Parent involvement is one of the most important components. Each school hosts a series of three workshops to help parents understand giftedness, early childhood development of intellectual abilities, multiple intelligences, and at-home en enrichment.

Over the last decade, e San Diego City Schools has seen participation in its gifted program go from 20 percent non-white to 48 percent nonwhite.

"The way out of poverty is education. Our goal through the gifted program is to help students with high potential, as well as all students, achieve at the highest level possible," Hermanson says.

Identifying potential is key to the San Diego school model, and Hermanson says the gifted program actively seeks to identify children with special talents. School leaders, he believes, could learn from coaches about aggressively recruiting children for education programs.

"If there was a 7-foot-1 basketball player on the playground in sixth grade, the coach would recognize that kid. Educators need to do the same with kids intellectual ability."

Creating Partnerships

Another program, known as Project Step Up, used collaboration among 12 school districts in four states to develop a three-year demonstration model for children overlooked for inclusion in gifted programs when normal selection methods are used. The program, developed by Dorothy Sisk, the Conn chair in gifted education at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, involves parents of at-risk children through seminars, home-based activities for parents and their children, and parent participation options.

"A significant issue is willingness to place high potential children together and encouraging teachers to stay with the group for two or three years," Sisk says. "After a three-year period, 50 percent of the students will qualify for the gifted program."

The parent seminars help parents learn about critical and creative thinking, communication skills, and building self-concept. They teach parents to identify and nurture their children's gifts and help them develop divergent-thinking skills and creating thinking styles.

"The program trains parents to give them many of the skills the teachers are using so they understand what the students are bringing home," Sisk says.

A parent newsletter offers updates on new ideas for becoming involved in the education of their children. Suggestions in the newsletter lead to activities for parents and children at home and help ensure parent involvement in the program.

The program also includes a parent education component. For example, in some locations with a high percentage of Hispanic participants, the programs have included English classes for parents. Sisk says these programs involve parents in the education process and help them become more comfortable in helping their children.

Rosas, the Texas superintendent, says an important role central-office administration is getting minority and economically disadvantaged parents to identify their children for programs. Middle class, non-minority parents are the ones usually doing the nominating, not minority parents," she says. "They think the places in the gifted program are going to white, middle-class children an way, so they don't nominate."

Rosas says school officials must work with their school boards and the public to encourage minority and economically disadvantaged parents to recognize the opportunities available for all children and take advantage of these opportunities.

Another important partnership is between central-office administrators and school board members. "There needs to be at least one member of the school board who is chair of an academic type committee to look at the overall gifted and talented program," Rosas says. "If you don't do that, the program gets killed."

Language Barriers

Students who speak English as a second language can be especially difficult to identify and serve. Often their IQ scores are lower than the cutoff for gifted programs because of their language deficits. In these cases, observations of gifted behaviors are more reliable than test batteries.

Professionals should use a range of other methods of identification with these children. These include parental identification and tests of non-verbal intelligence. Susan Johnsen, author of The Test of Nonverbal Intelligence, a non-verbal IQ screen, notes that educators must be careful to use an individually administered test that does not require information beyond that contained within the context of the test. This keeps the children from having to rely on experiences they may not have had.

Once the students are identified, working with them within the English as a Second Language and gifted curricula provides opportunity for much enrichment. Jo Ann Robisheaux, an ESL teacher in the Jefferson Parish Public Schools in New Orleans, and Mary M. Banbury, associate dean of the college of education at the University of New Orleans, suggest sample activities for language minority children. Among these are projects in which the children create folk tales from their family's native country and posters or commercials promoting tourism to their native country. Such activities build upon the experiences and home lives of the children.

Journaling also has been found successful with these children. As they learn to use the language more effectively, children begin to incorporate many details. This language exploration helps them develop verbal and written language as well as creativity.

Serving the needs of minority and economically disadvantaged gifted children is a growing concern in American education. Through early identification measures, enrichment programs, parental involvement, and teacher training these children can be given opportunities that will benefit them throughout their lives.

"You can't wait until March to start assessing these kids," Rosas says. "They have to be assessed from the beginning in order to have a successful program."

Sisk adds: "These are children who have been left out of the mainstream of gifted education and society. If we can give them a head start achievement, we have really moved at closing that gap."

Stephanie Mcintosh cordinates production of Gifted Child Today, Creative Kids, and Journal of Secondary Gifted Education.

Signs of Giftedness in Underserved Students

Early identification is key to serving the needs of gifted minority and economically disadvantaged students.

These students often do not reflect all of the characteristics typically thought of in identifying gifted children, so educators and parents need to keep in mind some of the characteristics typical of these children:

* Problem-solving skills. Gifted children solve problems well. Minority and economically disadvantaged students are no exception. However, these skills do not always manifest themselves in academic realms. Attention must be paid to the ability of students to solve problems during games, recess, or other times.

For example, a student may devise a way to play a game that he or she perceives as more fair to all the players, or the student may develop a new way to use a medium in art class to develop a picture.

* Attention to detail. Gifted children exhibit a high degree of attention to detail. If something is changed in a room, they notice. When describing artwork or stories, they use rich details. Their artwork itself may exhibit more details. Their journals may express ideas and concepts in a more-detailed fashion than other children.

* Non-verbal testing. A nonverbal measure should be part of the testing battery when working with minority children and those who are disadvantaged economically. These tests use methods that do not require the child to rely on life or academic experiences to answer the questions.

* Individual testing. Tests for these children should be administered individually when possible. This process ensures that the tests are not biased on the basis of the child's experience with test taking. Very young minority and economically disadvantaged children often are not used to taking tests and they do not see the tests as important. An individual administering the test to only one child can help keep the child on task.

* Early identification. Minority and economically disadvantaged children should be identified as early as possible so they can begin enrichment programs that may otherwise not be available or known to parents. Preschool or kindergarten identification is encouraged.

Stephanie McIntosh