Connecting QuantCrit to Gifted Education Research: An Introduction

QuantCrit in Educational Research

QuantCrit is a framework guided by CRT that serves as a toolkit for researchers studying race and racism in using quantitative methods in educational research (Gillborn et al., 2018). The idea of QuantCrit is not new as discussions about the deracialization of statistics and critical quantitative methods have been established for decades (Covarrubias & Vélez, 2013; Du Bois, 1899; Garcia et al., 2018; Solórzano & Yosso, 2000; Strunk & Hoover, 2019; Zuberi, 2001), but Gillborn et al. (2018) coined the specific term “QuantCrit” and created tenets to guide education researchers’ thinking. QuantCrit has become a vital resource, as educationists work to better understand how to study race, ethnicity, and racism within education, including gifted education.

As mentioned previously, Gillborn and colleagues (2018) were guided by CRT to develop a framework that could be used by quantitative researchers wanting to study race and racism, and QuantCrit was designed to also address critiques previously mentioned about quantitative research in education. Gillborn et al. (2018) emphasized that objectivity and neutrality are virtually impossible when conducting quantitative research and not necessarily desirable when studying race in education due to the social construction of statistics and who is included and excluded from those conversations. Therefore, they designed five QuantCrit tenets that could be used to guide scholars through critical examinations of race in quantitative methods. We used these QuantCrit tenets as a guide to provide concrete examples for gifted education researchers to analyze race and racism in their scholarship.

Race in Gifted Education Research

The historical context of gifted education is important to understand why QuantCrit could be an integral tool in examining race and racism. Gifted education, from its inception, has been plagued with research that promoted problematic viewpoints that upheld White people and Whiteness as superior. For example, when Lewis Terman arguably created the field of gifted education in the early 20th century, his research promoted discriminatory views on the basis of sex, sexuality, class, and race (Jolly, 2008, 2018; Maldonado, 2019). In a review of publications and promotional material from local and national gifted organizations, Mansfield (2015) wrote that Lewis Terman and colleague Leta Hollingsworth, the “parents” of gifted education, not only promoted problematic work, but also specifically racist and eugenicist research. This would change in the coming decades.

Later, scholars made research progress on studying race but noted that racism still played a large factor in gifted student participation and outcomes. From the government report, Educating the Gifted and Talented (Marland, 1971), S. P. Marland outlined the status of gifted and talented education in the United States. He argued that

Research has confirmed that many talented children perform far below their intellectual potential. We are increasingly being stripped of the comfortable notion that a bright mind will make its own way. Intellectual and creative talent cannot survive educational neglect and apathy. This loss is particularly evident in the minority groups who have in both social and educational environments every configuration calculated to stifle potential talent. (p. 6)

This clearly stated that “minority” racial groups (specifically Native Americans and Black/African Americans) had not yet received an equal educational experience. ¹ Yet, in the subsequent National Excellence report (Ross, 1993) more than 20 years later, authors still stated that “the talents of disadvantaged and minority students have been especially neglected” (p. 12) and called for research in this area as a priority. This time, it seems the call was heard. Jolly and Kettler (2008), when reviewing gifted research from 1994 to 2003, identified that research surrounding ethnicity was the second most popular focus of study, aligning with the priorities from the aforementioned National Excellence report.

A Need for Change

While work on race and racism has become more popular in recent decades, professional organizations such as the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) continued to report on unequal opportunities and called for the need for more research on “culturally and linguistically diverse learners” (NAGC, 2009), namely, a group of students, including African American, Hispanic/Latina/o/x, and Native American students (Ford et al., 2008). This recent research on race within gifted education focused on providing equal opportunities for all, noting specific issues within the gifted community. Equity issues within the broader educational realm include the achievement and excellence gaps, along with racial differences in terms of minimum and advanced proficiency on standardized assessments, respectively (Olszewski-Kubilius & Thomson, 2010; Plucker et al., 2010, 2013). Yet there are equity issues within gifted and talented programs as well. As Ford (1995) stated, “gifted programs are the most segregated educational programs in the United States” (p. 52), with underrepresentation taking place in gifted programs due to a host of factors, such as teachers’ prejudice and deficit thinking, which reduces recruitment and retention of Black, Latina/o/x, and Native American students (Ford et al., 2008, 2018); lack of screening and identification (Card & Giuliano, 2016; Ford, 1998); and low retention of students within the programs (Ecker-Lyster & Niileksela, 2017; Ford, 1998). In addition, in higher grades, schools with larger proportions of Black, Latina/o/x, and Native American students were less likely to offer advanced coursework options (Civil Rights Data Collection, 2014). The persistent issues that racially minoritized students face in gifted education, and education at large, continually indicate that there is still a need for race and racism to be studied and properly addressed in these educational systems.

Although recent research in gifted education has increased in focus on Students of Color, particularly Black, Latina/o/x, and Native American students, theoretical and methodological shifts are needed to adequately address racism in the United States, both in the past and in the present. As Viano and Baker (2020) stated, although social science research has since rejected eugenicist ideas, “it remains difficult to utilize the statistical tools created by eugenicists to study [race/ethnicity] in ways that do not lead to perpetuating that inequality” (p. 304). Addressing the problematic use of statistical methods becomes important for gifted education researchers, given the dominating presence of quantitative research within the field (Dai et al., 2011; Long, 2014; White et al., 2018). Thus, researchers need to understand how to use these tools to decrease the inequality plaguing our society.

A Guide for Reading

QuantCrit is a relatively new concept—conceived by and cited often by Gillborn et al. (2018)—yet both this article’s authors have actively been thinking through critical quantitative scholarship for multiple years. Both researchers have engaged in quantitative research for more than 6 years in our master’s and doctoral training and, while in doctoral programs, Priddie was interested in understanding how to center racially minoritized groups in quantitative methods and introduced Renbarger to the specific topic of QuantCrit. We come together as a Black woman and a White woman, who have experienced education differently as Renbarger’s racial privilege has protected her from many of the systemic issues within education. We heavily consider how our positionalities affect our vision for the brief and our interpretation of examples in the literature. We engage in this scholarship to bring awareness to researchers, and ourselves, on how we can study race and racism more equitably in gifted education research. Through current research practices, we continually witness researchers perpetuate harmful framing around racial/ethnic minoritized groups in gifted education and we are proposing that a conceptual shift is needed to minimize harm in educational research. To aid gifted education researchers in considering how to better approach conversations of race and racism using quantitative methods, we recommend that researchers use QuantCrit tenets to guide their work. We describe the tenets below and illustrate how QuantCrit can be used in gifted education research through examples when appropriate. Each section ends with recommendations for application. The tenets work in tandem and many examples could work for multiple tenets.

Tenet 1: The Centrality of Racism

The first tenet posits the centrality of racism and how it is a complex and fluid part of our society. Ignoring racism and its impact on our educational system further legitimizes and perpetuates racial inequities. Many articles have acknowledged the centrality of race in gifted education. This typically occurred through the literature review when authors cited research on bias, discrimination, unequal representation, or differences in resources available to students. For example, Hodges et al. (2017) examined the effects of participation in a program on students’ academic achievement. In the literature review, the researchers discussed how gifted and talented education was not culturally relevant for all students and intentionally discussed bias and discrimination in gifted identification practices.

However, many other articles identified symptoms of racism without actually naming racism as the cause for inequities. This was common when issues of racial/ethnic group underrepresentation were mentioned within the gifted education field. Authors reported statistics on proportions of students within programs by race/ethnicity but did not mention specific causes that may be relevant, such as prejudice, discrimination, and/or racism, as the reason for their underrepresentation. Rather than attribute systemic responsibility for the problem, this framing presented underrepresentation as a random occurrence instead of as a product of institutional racism (Barnes, 2022; Naylor et al., 2015). To effectively demonstrate this tenet, authors should identify how specific instances of systemic racism apply to their research topic and/or provide policy and practice recommendations that would inform racial, systemic changes.

Scholars should continue to promote scholarship that fights for racial equity and honors all Students of Color. Honoring Students of Color requires a reckoning with how White students have become the standard/norm and Students of Color are perceived as deviants of the norm. It is not enough to say there are differences between student groups; researchers must acknowledge how racism plays a part in creating and maintaining those differences, whether they be in gifted education initiatives and programs, schools within varying districts, or the larger society. This change includes moving away from de-racialized terminology, such as “diverse” or “low-income” to allude to a racial/ethnic minoritized group when researchers intend to discuss a specific racial/ethnic sample or population (Cedillo, 2018). The use of coded language leaves room for audience interpretation, which can lead to a reliance on biases and stereotypes to fill in missing information regarding the sample or population of discussion. Scholars can also frame research questions and survey items to reflect the agency of systems rather than students in perpetuating harm (Castillo & Gillborn, 2022) and connect all variables and results to specific frameworks and systems as well (Suzuki et al., 2021). Researchers must move away from avoiding conversations about race, ethnicity, and racism and how these operate in the gifted education field, and the work completed in gifted education should be done to identify and eliminate the barriers students from all backgrounds face, specifically gifted Students of Color.

Tenet 2: Numbers Are Not Neutral

The second tenet states that numbers are not neutral and emphasizes how quantitative data and methods are frequently used to serve White interests, which are established around conquests and domination of people of color through physical property, aspects of human rights, powers, and liberties important to well-being (Harris, 1993). This is apparent when researchers amplify deficit theories, ignore the centrality of racism in their methodologies, conflate race and ethnicity, and support objective stances when studying race (DeCuir-Gunby & Schutz, 2014; Suzuki et al., 2021). Operating through a lens that race and racism are ingrained in our society, the lack of race/ethnicity discussion beyond demographic information is troubling and in ways, display how Whiteness is the standard and continually given priority in gifted education. Tenet 2 was exemplified well in Bolland et al. (2019) where connections between poverty and racism were mentioned early on to tie into how these experiences would affect students’ affective and psychosocial behaviors. Through this example, researchers created a context that highlights the systemic issues that are more than likely going to affect the educational experiences of multiple student populations.

A great initial step for gifted education researchers would be to provide a positionality statement within their work, which helps their readers identify their stance on knowledge production. Most research is subjective, especially when issues of race/ethnicity and racism are relevant, and it is crucial for researchers to identify how their personal experiences shape each study. These statements should include, but are not limited to, aspects of the researchers’ identities, such as race/ethnicity, class, age, and gender, along with how these identities reflect power and privilege and how the researchers’ positioning influences their decisions within the study and how they interpret their findings (Parson, 2019). While researchers may hesitate to acknowledge their positionality, it can be seen as a delimitation to the study, highlighting the existing oppressive structures that are often reinforced within quantitative research and helping both the researcher and intended audience understand how the researcher is present within their study. This statement eliminates the need for readers to “read the minds” of researchers by making explicit the background and choices made in the study. Subsequently, gifted education research journals should create more opportunities for scholarship to include positionality statements to challenge the notion that quantitative research can only be objective. Similarly, researchers should be transparent about the limitations and the specific contexts of the study to allow the reader to determine the applicability of the study to their work (Castillo & Gillborn, 2022). More information, in alignment with calls for open science practices, helps increase the trustworthiness of a study (Cook et al., 2018; Renbarger et al., 2021).

Tenet 3: Categories Are Not Natural

The third tenet posits that categories and groups are neither “natural” nor given and this tenet explains how socially constructed concepts, such as race, are normalized in the research process. Scientists concluded that race has no genetic underpinnings and the racial categories existing today are upheld by human desires to categorize people based on “perceptions of racial differences” (DeCuir-Gunby & Schutz, 2014, p. 245). Therefore, discussions of race without acknowledgment that race is socially constructed by human perception can cause issues when explaining the specific actions of a racial group. Tenet 3 applies most when race is interpreted as a “preexisting” or biological characteristic and can negatively affect racially minoritized groups when race is weaponized to suggest that a phenomenon took place because of participants’ race and not acts of racism. As James (2008) stated, “The atheoretical use of race as a demographic ‘background’ variable is misleading and promotes an essentialized understanding of race by hiding the social underpinnings of presumed racial differences” (p. 43). When researchers use race as a variable without discussing racism or other social, historical, or political rationales, they reinforce the incorrect assumption that race is biological or inherent rather than a social construct. This also occurs when researchers use White as the normative category. As sociologists Johfre and Freese (2021) stated, “Selection of the reference category does not affect formal results and so in this sense is purely arbitrary. However, formal arbitrariness does not necessarily imply cognitive neutrality. Using one category as the reference inherently introduces an asymmetry upon categories” (p. 254). By placing White participants as the reference category, researchers can unintentionally reinforce Whiteness as the norm.

A good example of how race is often weaponized is in the model minority myth, which bolsters generalizations that all Asian American students are smart and successful, and promotes Asian American students’ overrepresentation in gifted education, thus ignoring their societal minoritization and “can result in the invisibility of marginalized Asian American students” (Chhuon & Sullivan, 2013, p. 4). This stereotype systemically benefits Asian American students because they are more likely to be placed in academically rigorous courses (even if they have not performed well enough to do so), which enhances their overall academic performance (Lee & Zhou, 2015). However, the model minority myth is attributed to outdated conceptions of achievement and ignores important explanatory variables (Mun & Hertzog, 2019). While in the past Asian American students performed better on standardized tests, compared with other racial groups, this advantage has decreased in more recent research that included important characteristics relevant to the Asian American experience (Galindo & Pong, 2011), such as immigrant status, family resources, and English proficiency (Potochnick & Mooney, 2015). There are also environmental factors as well; for example, higher achieving Asian American students tend to live near better schools (Joo et al., 2016). The model minority myth is emphasized when Asian American students are grouped in the same “Asian” category despite varying ethnicities and racialization based on their position “relative to the idealized White standard” (Chhuon & Sullivan, 2013, p. 6) and despite the fact that Asian American students differ with respect to standardized test scores and grade point average (GPA) based on characteristics such as their country of origin and parental immigrant status (Galindo & Pong, 2011). Upholding the model minority myth specifically harms Asian American students because their experiences are not disaggregated to show within-group differences that would explain their varying academic achievement, while placing all Asian American students in opposition with other racially minoritized students. It sets up competition between Asian American students and other racially minoritized students (i.e., Black and Hispanic/Latino/a/x), which upholds anti-Black racism and White supremacy (Poon et al., 2016). These types of narratives about racially minoritized students are problematic because they set up expectations, whether good or bad, about their giftedness and achievement, and contribute to how they are treated in educational spaces.

Some gifted education articles acknowledged race as a social construct and are worth highlighting. Young and Young (2018) utilized a national database to understand students’ participation in advanced coursework using a critical quantitative analysis. Their study focused exclusively on Black students because

analyzing differences between groups does not provide researchers, teachers, or parents information that can be translated into programs and services that can serve Black students. Thus, the researchers performed a strength-based and growth-centered analysis contrary to the popular deficit-minded group comparative designs. (p. 49)

By focusing on Black students who have been marginalized in advanced coursework, they could improve equity without talking about how they differed from the White norm, as is typical of equity work. This study also emphasizes why comparative analyses on racial/ethnic group academic outcomes are unnecessary because minoritized groups are worthy of direct focus. In addition, researchers Young and Young (2022) demonstrated how extracting data for Black students separately can provide important meta-analytic values for evaluating (under)representation. Other examples were less explicit. For instance, Ben-Eliyahu et al. (2017) used effect coding with their race variable and made the multiracial category the base. This diverged from much gifted education research that treated White students as the normative group and examined how all other races were different from White or that compared Whites with every other racial category in a binary manner. Changing model specifications in these ways acknowledged race without upholding the racial hierarchy.

Whether scholars aim to utilize a specific QuantCrit lens or not, all scholars must address how racial/ethnic identities and racism are relevant to their specific research interests in gifted education. Race or ethnicity is not just a demographic variable that can briefly be mentioned in a study to demonstrate a “diverse” or representative sample; “the use of race as a control variable flattens out the meanings of racial differences and replaces it with a generic notion of difference” (James, 2008, p. 43). Educators’ perceptions of how race/ethnicity and racism operate in our society have major implications specifically on how minoritized racial/ethnic groups are treated in our education systems and we must continue to challenge the systems perpetuating injustices, including academic scholarship. Researchers should also choose variables, models, and groups based on theoretical framing and use alternatives such as contrasts when possible (Johfre & Freese, 2021).

Tenet 4: Prioritize Experiences of People of Color

The fourth tenet places particular importance on the experiential knowledge of People of Color, and other outsider groups. QuantCrit aims to center their knowledge to inform scholarship by including race and other variables to describe a fuller explanation of a person or group’s experience. Sociologist Carole Marks described this by saying, “It is not simply that race is socially constructed but that it is embedded in a system of knowledge and reality that are as well” (Marks, 2008, p. 62). Racism operates through many other societal components and researchers fail to uphold this tenet when they statistically control for race in various analyses, as if race is not continually having a presence in each person’s experiences. This tenet requires that researchers acknowledge how other variables can interact with race and ethnicity to exacerbate findings, such as gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and ability status.

In examining gifted education literature, few gifted articles centered People of Color’s experiences. The lack of articles that examined the intersection of race with other variables is not surprising, as Goings and Ford (2018) found that few gifted education studies focused on race/ethnicity between 2000 and 2015. Given the foundation of gifted education, systemic inequities seem to play a role in how students are perceived based on their gifted status and researchers should consider bringing in more discussion around how race/ethnicity might change student experiences, given perceptions of their abilities.

This tenet is neglected when race/ethnicity, among other variables, is statistically controlled for in analyses, which was highlighted in a few articles. Controlling for race/ethnicity in analyses presents a bit of complexity. On one end, statisticians want to show how much independent variables relate to the dependent variables without confounding variables muddying up the results. However, it can also demonstrate a lack of care for the differing perspectives that people of different racial/ethnic categories bring to our research while neglecting to acknowledge how embedded race/ethnicity and racism are in our educational systems.

One example of research that honored this tenet was an article on STEM education (Crabtree et al., 2019). The purpose of the article was to understand racial and socioeconomic disproportionality within advanced STEM coursework in one school district. These authors utilized a systems theory lens that “is rooted in a biological understanding of interdependence within and between organisms, communities, and ecosystems (Hammond, 2010)” (p. 210). Using this framework allowed these authors to acknowledge how multiple aspects of a student’s world, specifically race and class together, influenced students’ experiences in gifted education. In the same volume, Graefe and Ritchotte (2019) also explored advanced coursework, specifically Advanced Placement exam success predictors for Hispanic students. ² Within their logistic regression, they included multiple variables as predictors to provide a more holistic understanding of the American student experience. Predictor variables included not only class (SES proxy of free and reduced-price lunch participation), but also gender and whether English was the students’ first language. These were intentionally included into the model and detailed individually within the literature review. Recognizing multiple areas of privilege and oppression in this way can thus provide a nuanced understanding of the student experience.

Researchers should move toward highlighting the strengths that various racial/ethnic groups of students bring to gifted education and continually reject deficit framing that views students as problems needing to be fixed. For example, Sablan (2019) created a questionnaire using a Community Cultural Wealth framework that asks students about forms of aspirational, navigational, familial, and resistant capital that help provide positive counter stories regarding the educational experiences of Students of Color. Other possibilities include using race-focused constructs and methodologies as DeCuir-Gunby and Schutz (2014) have outlined specifically within educational psychology contexts. These race-focused constructs and methodologies expand on current approaches to acknowledge the complexity of race (DeCuir-Gunby & Schutz, 2014), which can be useful in reexamining gifted education testing, resource access and allocation, and academic achievement within these programs.

Moreover, the disaggregation of racial/ethnic minoritized groups in gifted education research can help illuminate the variability among groups, as opposed to inferring that all racial/ethnic minoritized groups have the same experience (Castillo & Gillborn, 2022; Hodges et al., 2022). There is complexity regarding sample size when it comes to quantitative analyses and how small sample sizes, specifically when analyzing racial/ethnic minoritized groups, can present issues such as de-anonymizing and exposing sensitive information of minoritized participants. However, all efforts should be taken to emphasize valuing the experiences of racially/ethnically minoritized groups in quantitative analyses to create targeted approaches to solving gifted education issues that affect Students of Color.

Tenet 5: Use Numbers for Social Justice Purposes

Finally, the fifth tenet rejects the self-serving notions of quantitative research and suggests that QuantCrit scholarship should be conducted through social justice and equity orientations. QuantCrit work should be actively working with/against numbers to recognize how a socially constructed concept such as race is legitimized in our society. Of the five QuantCrit tenets, many gifted researchers used quantitative research for social justice and equity reasons. Frequently, authors focused on equity in terms of underrepresentation in gifted education, such as through differences in identification rates based on racial categories. For instance, researchers examined the proportion of students of each race and ethnicity, language proficiency, and disability status within gifted education across the United States, using data from the Office of Civil Rights (Peters et al., 2019). They found that students from these groups continue to be underserved and then concluded the article with specific policy recommendations to “improve the diversity of populations identified with gifts and talents” (p. 280). Other studies discussed racial equity in terms of student achievement (Young et al., 2017), funding (Hodges, 2018), and assessment (Besnoy et al., 2016). Authors acknowledged these as equity issues that needed to be solved, which demonstrates an understanding of deeper systemic issues that drive inequities.

Many fields, such as psychology, have taken stances that support the need for research that promotes racial equity (APA Task Force on Race and Ethnicity Guidelines in Psychology, 2019). As seen in the 2022 Gifted Child Quarterly special issue, it is clear that there are many issues regarding racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic equity with no clear consensus in the gifted education field as to how to address these issues (Worrell & Dixson, 2022). Therefore, in accordance with Tenet 5, gifted researchers should stay committed to equity and social justice research, not only in representation but also in other gifted education areas as well, such as the potential harm of gifted programming for certain racial groups (Barnes, 2022) along with who is funded to conduct gifted research and how it is being conducted (Garces-Bacsal & Elhoweris, 2022).