Strategy to Optimally Identify Students for Gifted Services

Balanced research and practice

The identification of students for gifted programs is often a balancing act of accuracy and cost. Administering identification assessments to all students misses the fewest students, but requires the most time and money. To limit costs, some districts put relatively few students through the identification process, resulting in missed students, often those from traditionally disadvantaged groups. There are ways to increase system accuracy without increasing cost. This paper presents one such method, called Optimal Identification, that leverages existing, universally-administered assessments to create a two-phase identification system that retains the sensitivity of universal consideration systems, but at a fraction of the cost. This procedure has applications and implications for any programs that base admission on non-universally administered criteria.