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Dive Brief:
- Broader, more thoughtful screening to identify gifted and talented students can help uncover those who are hiding in plain sight, leading to not only a greater number receiving enrichment programming but a more diverse group, according to a pair of districts in Texas and South Carolina.
- Since Texas’ Northwest Independent School District in Fort Worth put universal screening in place for 2nd graders, educators have discovered a deeper pool of gifted students from populations like English learners, those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and those whose parents didn’t know how to advocate for them. They’ve also noted “twice exceptional” students whose challenges, such as dyslexia, might have masked other talents under a more cursory approach.
- In South Carolina’s Charleston County School District, educators instituted universal screening and moved beyond a one-time test to demarcate who was gifted, taken in 2nd grade, to a “Stretch or Support” strengths-based model to build critical thinking skills and a reevaluation in 4th grade — a shift that has roughly tripled to 150 the number of students identified for advanced learning services in the past two years, says Elizabeth Uptegrove, assistant director for gifted and talented.
Dive Insight:
In Northwest ISD, across the district’s 24 elementary schools, 85 1st graders and 89 2nd graders are identified as gifted, but that number jumps to 215 by 3rd grade due to the universal screening in second, said Audra Rowell, advanced academics coordinator. Rowell noted that, districtwide, 28% of students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, while they comprise 12% of the gifted population.
As a district that’s grown by 14,000 students in the past 10 years and become significantly more diverse, with more than 70 languages spoken at home, “the fact that we started universal screening so long ago, when the district was smaller and more homogenous, was impressive,” said Rowell, who joined Northwest ISD in 2015 after its implementation. “Now, it’s really critical.”
About five or six years ago, teachers started noticing correlations between students who performed highly on the Cognitive Abilities Test created by Riverside Insights but did poorly on achievement testing because they were twice exceptional, Rowell said.
“Giftedness hides that weakness,” she said. “In elementary education especially, we tend to focus on achievement testing a lot, or how kids are doing in the classroom, but the CogAT helps teachers see how kids learn, and think, and what their strengths are.”
Although not everyone on staff was fully supportive of universal screening when she arrived, Rowell said that the ability to both identify talented students — including at the district’s Title I school — and also to uncover data that’s helpful with regard to all students has led to more of a unified commitment.
“It’s for everybody,” she said. “Finding gifted kids is a great bonus.”
In Charleston County School District, the “Stretch or Support” model arrived when Uptegrove arrived from another district where she had pioneered the approach. The SOS model uses CogAT data to analyze students’ areas of strength and opportunities to stretch their skills, as well as areas of relative weakness where they need supports, she said.
The district provided professional development for teachers to deploy CogAT data toward both ends, underscoring that the results can provide verbal, non-verbal and quantitative information that identifies whether students reason better with words, pictures or numbers, respectively, Uptegrove said.
When she created the SOS approach in her previous district, she used a curated game list to help those students practice their critical thinking skills in fun ways.
“What we noticed, of course, was that all the kids wanted to play the games,” Uptegrove said. “It was a great talent development shift to not gatekeep what we were doing for students and allow all kids exposure to critical thinking. They all deserve to grow in that way.”
In Charleston County, Uptegrove noticed underrepresented populations were often the ones not identified as gifted, and she worked to bridge the demographic gaps. She rolled out the approach to educators she supervised and others have picked it up. In addition, she noticed students being retested on CogAT beyond 2nd grade were often White students whose parents advocated for them — so she advocated for all students to be retested in 4th grade.
“To see the increase of three times as many kids is very significant,” Uptegrove said. “But it’s two-fold: Yes, we gave everybody exposure to the test again, but we’re also exposing them to the critical thinking games, so kids are more prepared for the kind of thinking that’s needed.”
