Abstract
Schools exist to educate, yet the emphasis on age-based, grade-level standards fails to account for the wide range of academic readiness that exists in every classroom. Special education programs exist to meet student needs; gifted education should be no different. The authors, all gifted education researchers, present a vision for a model of gifted education that is aligned with Response to Intervention and personalized learning. At its heart, it is concerned with addressing the real-time academic needs of every student, with the ultimate goal of maximizing the learning of every student.
If all students are not learning and developing, then school has failed its mission.
The goal of gifted and talented services is to challenge students who would otherwise go underchallenged and undereducated in school. Unfortunately, gifted education programs often use narrow and restrictive criteria to decide who can participate. As a result, they tend to focus on a tiny and homogeneous group of students, shutting out many others who would benefit from the supports and services they offer (Card & Giuliano, 2015).
Moreover, gifted programs often provide services that have little connection to the specific learning needs of students. Rather than tailoring their instruction to individual students, they provide generalized and haphazard curricula built upon the common misconception that children who are exceptional in one area must be exceptional across all areas. Given this lack of connection between services and student needs, it is no surprise that an analysis of nationally representative data showed that, although the impact of gifted programming on achievement varies from school to school, the average effect is negligible (Adelson, McCoach, & Gavin, 2012). (See Plucker & Callahan, this issue, for a review of the research on effective, domain-specific programs and services.)
Put simply, many gifted programs are far more exclusive than they need to be and should adopt a more inclusive perspective that serves more students. We recognize that this is a difficult task. Inequities are — and always have been — pervasive in American public education, with students of different races, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds receiving different levels and quality of support (Plucker & Peters, 2016; Worrell & Dixson, 2018). But fostering advanced achievement and equity need not be mutually exclusive.
Complicating matters further is the existence of individual differences among students in their mastery of content and the speed at which they learn (Deary, 2012; von Hippel, Workman, & Downey, 2018). Many school systems continue to reflect the assumptions of the industrial age, when standardization was paramount (Rose, 2012). Today, the “typical” American 5th-grade classroom includes students whose instructional needs span at least seven grade levels (see Figure 1). In a recent study, Scott Peters and colleagues (2017) found that 20-49% of all students were already achieving above their current grade level in reading at the beginning of the school year, and 14-37% already performed above their current grade level in mathematics. In short, millions of children are ill-served by a standardized curriculum that assigns learning objectives based on chronological age. To meet students’ needs, schools have to become much more flexible, responsive to individual differences, and willing to provide opportunities for self-directed learning (Marope, 2014). Students vary, and schools must offer varied services to meet them where they are.
Mathematics achievement distribution in the average American grade 5 classroom
Toward a new model
We propose a model of gifted education that is proactive and locally focused on students’ present needs in specific domains.
First, teachers and school staff must act as talent scouts, proactively identifying students who are underchallenged. That is, they should make it a priority to assess every student and then review the data to find those who are performing at a higher level than the material they are being taught.
Second, gifted services must be local. To be most effective, education should be situated in the local community, taking into account the local culture, resources, and values. To identify students who might benefit from a greater level of challenge, educators should assess where students stand relative to other students within their school. It isn’t relevant where they rank among the top students in the country. Rather, the question is whether students are having their learning maximized in the regular classroom or if a more intensive intervention is needed (see Peters, Carter, & Plucker, this issue, for more on this topic). Judgments as to which students are well-served by existing grade-level instruction should reflect the school environment and available resources. This will look different from school to school. Just as art and athletic programs differ depending on the size and characteristics of the community, so should academic programming.
Third, services must depend on students’ present needs. Our model de-emphasizes the labeling of students as gifted. Instead, we focus on identifying students for temporary advanced academic interventions. Students might require a greater challenge in a particular subject this year, in this school, but not next year or at another school. Our goal is to alleviate instructional mismatch, not to diagnose students who have the trait of giftedness.
Lastly, gifted academic services must be domain specific. There are some children with exceptionally high ability across all domains, and they should be educated appropriately. However, many more students are underchallenged in just one or two specific content areas. For example, a student might be an average performer in English and history but have exceptional mathematical ability. Another might struggle in mathematics but read books that are far above grade level. Schools often limit their gifted services to the few students who test at a high level in every subject, but if they focus on developing talents in specific subject areas, schools will identify many more students who would benefit from more challenging instruction.
Systematic assessment
Addressing the needs of a wide range of learners has been the focus of many educational interventions. For example, Response to Intervention (RtI) was designed to provide timely identification of students for special education services (rather than waiting for them to fail before offering them support; Fuchs et al., 2003). In an RtI system, the school monitors all students in the general education classroom and, if a student is found to be struggling in a particular area, provides them with a targeted intervention right away, before they fall any further behind. Although RtI is often assumed to serve children identified as having disabilities, it’s actually more flexible than that: RtI can provide appropriate and timely supports and services to any student who needs them (Fuchs, Fuchs, & Stecker, 2010), including students who need more advanced learning opportunities.
The traditional model of gifted education uses assessments to create a single snapshot of each student (and some states even require the use of general standardized tests to determine placement in a gifted program; Rinn et al., 2020). In contrast, we propose that schools assess student progress regularly in all academic subjects to identify any student who isn’t being sufficiently challenged in a particular class (Braden, 2003), and to do so quickly, without waiting for them to become disengaged. Further, those students should be reassessed periodically, to see whether they are progressing at the expected pace, faster, or slower (Dixson et al., 2020). Assessments should be research-based, directly aligned with the given subject matter, and used formatively. This means that many high-quality tests can serve this purpose — anything from a standardized algebra placement test to the SAT (Dixson & Worrell, 2016; Furr, 2017).
Appropriate and equitable services
Identifying students’ specific academic needs only adds value if schools actually do something with that information, providing each student with an appropriate course of study that offers the right level of challenge. Because learners — including gifted learners — are diverse, no single instructional model will serve everyone.
Further, educators should keep in mind that to provide an equitable education, they don’t have to teach all students the same content the same way on the same day, any more than providing equitable medical care means writing the same prescription for every patient. Rather, equity in education requires that every student receives appropriately challenging and culturally relevant instruction that helps them fulfill their academic potential. Students have a range of starting points, rates of learning, and interest levels, and schools must be willing to adapt to them, rather than expecting students to adapt to whatever services their schools happen to provide.
At the same time, it is not equitable to provide different instruction to students whose learning needs are equivalent. Sadly, such exclusion has occurred under the banner of gifted education, leaving Black, Latinx, and low-income students disproportionately underchallenged (Peters et al., 2019). If schools identify talent more systematically and start as early as kindergarten (to spot talented children who weren’t fortunate enough to have rich preschool learning opportunities), schools can diversify the population of students who receive appropriate challenges (Plucker & Peters, 2016).
Dimensions of service
A number of empirically supported services — including acceleration, flexible grouping, differentiation, enrichment, and more — are available to address the academic needs of advanced learners (see Plucker & Callahan, this issue). However, each model has its own aims and limitations, and schools must carefully evaluate which services work best for their students. To some degree, which service to provide depends on the level, specificity, and amount (or dose) of service that will maximize each student’s learning.
Level refers to both the difficulty of the content and the pace of learning. Even within gifted programs, some students need more challenging material, or to move through material more quickly than others. Level varies from school to school. Thus, if a student moves to a different school, they may need a different level of service — if the new school offers more advanced instruction, then the student may no longer need gifted services; if regular instruction at the new school is too easy, then the student may need gifted services for the first time.
Specificity allows students to receive gifted services within some subject areas even if they do not require them in others (Makel et al., 2016). Because there is no federal mandate for gifted education, there is little consistency in what services schools offer. Typically, schools focus on providing gifted services in mathematics, reading, and science, but these need not be the sole domains offered. Just as schools offer multiple sports and a variety of classes and clubs in the arts, they can offer a range of advanced academic opportunities.
The amount of services refers to how frequently and for how long students receive advanced learning opportunities. As with medications, academic services should be offered in a high enough dose to have an effect (Wai et al., 2010). A once-a-week 30-minute class may be sufficient for a small handful of students, but most are likely to require higher doses to maximize their learning.
Regardless of what service is provided, it’s important to measure a program’s success to determine whether and how to make changes. These metrics should be based on the goals of the program and need not be confined to improved standardized test scores. A variety of other assessment tools — including student portfolios, student self-assessments, and teacher evaluations — can give educators an idea of the success of their efforts, but also come with their own limitations.
Steps to implementation
Implementing gifted education to maximize learning requires all stakeholders — including teachers, administrators, policy makers, parents, and students themselves — to rethink old assumptions about what it means to be gifted, how to identify and serve students who need gifted programming, what those programs are supposed to accomplish, and how to measure their success. Unless changes are made in each of these areas, efforts to maximize learning will be piecemeal and of limited effectiveness.
Historically, many schools have failed to provide advanced opportunities for most students who need them. However, past failures need not predict the future. Schools can help all students meet their potential, but only if they commit to taking proactive steps to seek out students who need greater challenge right now, in a specific subject area, because they are performing ahead of the instruction their school provides.