Underrepresentation of African Americans Students in Gifted Programs - Term Paper Example

Giftedness- underrepresentation of African Americans in gifted programs According to Sally M. Reis and Joseph S. Renzulli’s (2009) research, students that fall under the category of talented and gifted consists of a diverse population, these students are parts of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds and all of them have different socioeconomic backgrounds (Reis 2009). They figured out that these students have a huge range of personal traits such as ability to bare risk, ready to face new challenges and gain new experience, ability to get along with different people and have a vast amount of knowledge and they try at their optimum level to attain aims and objectives. Although all gifted individuals have varied traits, characteristics and behaviors but the most common of these elements found in gifted students were: humor, capability to understand and comprehend symbols, highly creative, proper reasoning and decision making skills, well shaped cognition, highly motivated and excellent ability to communicate. All these elements are necessary for an individual to perform well in different settings. These researchers even figured out that other than previous stated elements, gifted students even have high amount of emotional intelligence. People such as the great Martin Luther King, Lady Diana, and Rachel Carson were the ones who made a huge difference to the gifted students, the traits and behaviors exhibited by these great individuals include: they were quite courageous, they had a very high desire to turn things around, the degree of cognitive as well as physical energy vested in them was quite high. These people even had team work, leadership skills. The existence of the myth that the gifted students are those who have one similar standard of ability, behavior and traits is due to the fact that various gifted students have not been able to gain education and training due to which they have failed to develop their abilities and skills. The researchers even figured out that gifted students are not gifted with all these abilities and skills since birth, and there are not few special chosen ones who have been awarded with these skills and abilities and these skills and abilities are developed by those individuals who have high potential. Thus giftedness is not inborn, rather it is learned (Reis 2009). According to John O’ Neil’s (1992) findings, focus on performance assessment tests have increased due to the increase in importance of students graduating with skills and abilities required to solve new problems (O'Neil 1992). Performance tests refers to tests taken for a specific ability or skill, for example to check whether a student has learned a particular foreign language, a test that makes him speak in that language is the most appropriate as compared to multiple choice tests. Multiple choice tests cannot help in accomplishing whether a student has learned what he was trained for and whether he has acquired the skills and abilities for which he had gained education. These tests are even conducted on state level; the state conducts performance assessment tests to check how well individual students are performing at the state level. Teachers are even experiencing immense pressure from these tests, teachers are focusing their teaching methods and syllabus according to these tests, and these tests are used to rank different educational institutes. These tests have even changed the teaching system, for example: previously educational centers used to base their teaching criteria on multiple choice tests and they used to assign less writing tasks to students, but now more writing tasks are assigned to students so students can compete well in writing performance assessment tests. These tests even benefits the teachers as these teachers experience development themselves, they are involved in the creation of these tests and the marking and the ranking systems designed for these tests. John O’ Neil further figured out that the costs of performance assessment tests are higher than the costs of simple multiple choice tests because the resources needed to conduct performance assessment tests are more than the resources needed for traditional multiple choice tests. Cost of time is another concern of these tests as students are already involved in other tests, they even have to devote their time for performance assessment tests and teachers have to devote extra time to meet the standards of these tests. The research further showed that performance test room can help in enhancing the way teachers instruct students and these tests will even enhance the burden of accountability of student learning on the educational institutes. These tests may come under scrutiny as students of different educational institutes may perform in different ways and exhibit different results as students from institutes that have lower amount of resources may perform less than those who belong the institutes that have higher amount of resources. To implement these tests, policy makers will have to move cautiously and they should not change the entire system in one move (O'Neil 1992). According to researchers Donna Y. Ford, J. John Harris III, Cynthia A. Tyson, and Michelle Frazier Trotman (2003), there is lack of one single definite reason of why the African American Students are not fully represented for educational programs designed for gifted students (Ford 2003). They focused their research on whether this under representation is caused due to lack of competence within the families and the children of Black American or the cause of under representation is the lack of interested towards search for talent conducted by the society and the educational institutes. To identify whether an individual is gifted or not is just prediction based so more needs to be done to ensure that these predictions are of higher level of accuracy. The continuous under representation of the American Black children in gifted educational programs and different walks of life is of major concern and a huge tragedy. Various reasons have contributed to the underrepresentation, firstly the Black American fail to obtain proper education. Blacks have failed to obtain proper education as people discriminate and people exercise deficit thinking while thinking about blacks. For examples: certain teachers think that Black children are unable to learn and perform well as they themselves are not interested and lack the willingness to gain education. Due to this way of viewing Blacks, the opportunities and access to proper education have become restricted for the Blacks. Active measures can be exercised to solve this problem and change the mindset of the people and change the way Blacks are looked upon and thought of. These measures include: accepting, adopting, changing, creating strategies and offering tools and process that focus on the impact of socio, cultural and economic factors on an individual’s behavior. The main challenge is to focus on contextual and cultural elements to increase the opportunities available to Black African Americans (Ford 2003). According to James J. Gallagher (2005), race has played a vital role in shaping and creation of education targeted towards gifted students (Gallagher 2005). His research exhibited those minority students such as the Black African American students were lower in number in the gifted educational programs as compared to students coming from those backgrounds that are referred to as majority. This was because these students had a lower IQ level as compared to those White students who had more exposure of the high quality education. His research exhibits that efforts were made to find the correct reasons of Black American students being lesser in number in gifted programs. To find the reasons, IQ tests were first assumed to be culturally and racially biased and efforts were made to create IQ tests without such biases, but it turned out to be of no use as such creation of such academic assessment tools were present. Secondly, the economic and political support for these tools and programs were very restricted as these programs were seen as ways of promoting inequality in education. According to his research, the main reason of restricted number of Black Americans in these programs is lack of opportunity. For example: a Black kid might not be able to gain high quality education in his childhood because of lack of funds in his family, due to this he might not be able to develop skills that are exhibited by those who come from wealthy backgrounds and gain high quality education. To ensure that talent is not wasted and enrich students who have potential talent following measures can be taken; potential talent should be identified in the earlier years of student life, the method of teaching should be different for different children while the syllabus should be similar, educational institutes should highlight children who have exhibited outstanding performance, and students need to work hard and gain necessary skills needed for success (Gallagher 2005). According to Eric Louis Mann (2006), a student’s mathematical skills are identified through the speed he takes to perform calculations and how accurate are his calculations and less emphasis is paid to the problem solving skills that students should have (Margison 2006). Due to this method of identifying talent, students have been restricted to use and memorize certain rules required to solve mathematical problems and their creativity has become limited. Due to such behavior, students get bored of mathematics and the only way to turn around this situation is to allow students to show their creativity in this subject. It is very difficult to determine children who are mathematically creative; one way of identifying this kind of talent was to allow students to show creativity in creating different ways of solving mathematical problems. Ranking these methods of solving mathematical problems requires time and depends on the analyzer’s interpretation. The researcher used various already available methods to identify students that were mathematically creative. The research even analyzed the relationship between mathematical creativity and perception of self, creatively able, perception of teachers of mathematical talent, gender and mathematical achievement. The results of the study were that mathematical achievement and mathematical creativity had a higher percentage of relationship than the relationship between mathematical creativity and other elements that were researched (Margison 2006). Erin Morris Miller’s (2006) study was aimed towards the opinion s teachers held for giftedness (Margison 2006). The study was subjected towards identifying the reasons that teachers used to select students for different giftedness programs. The questions that were reviewed in this program included: whether teachers used cause and affect method to select students, whether different teachers use same reasoning to select students, what did the teachers think about these programs, whether there are differences between different level of teachers and whether there is a difference between the structure and the content of theories used by different teachers and what are the opinions held by teachers about diversity in gifted students. The outcome of this study was that teachers were not incorporating modern way of identifying gifted students and they were using traditional methods. Secondly, teachers who had different educational experience about giftedness were not different from each other but the theories they were using were not similar (Margison 2006). A study conducted by Pierce, Adams, Speirs Neumeister, Cassady, Dixon and Cross (2006) shows that students representing the minorities are lesser in number in gifted programs because teachers have created their own way of selecting students for these programs and they tend to believe that students from minority groups are not highly gifted (Pierce 2006). In their study they figured out that the reasons behind lesser students of minority groups in gifted programs are: underrepresentation of these students, different ways of identifying who is gifted and who is not. Their study even exhibited that educators have taken the issue of underrepresentation into consideration and are trying to figure out ways and tools to identify talent from the minority pool. Educators have advised that different methods can be used to identify talent, these methods include: original assessments and tests that do not require use of voice. They even advocated for the usage of performance based assessment tests that focus on problem solving and creativity for selection of gifted students. Various measures have been taken to identify gifted talent from the minority groups. One such measure was the creation of CLUE (Clustering Learners Unlocks Equity), in this measure they used non verbal assessment criteria to check whether this assessment would increase the selection of students from the minority groups. The result of this research was that a higher percentage of minority students were figured out as talented and gifted, this proved that the use of traditional assessment methods such as non verbal tests are very helpful in identifying talent in minority groups. The educators who recommended the use of non-verbal tests even recommended that those who scored high should even exhibit high scores in the same academic area in verbal and quantitative reasoning tests. The study was conducted on 26 students out of which 77% students were able to match the criteria set by the educators (Pierce 2006). According to Callahan’s (2005) research states that the educational system is still faulty due to the lower amount of representation of minority groups, even though considerable amount of minority students being considered as talented and gifted (Callahan 2005). Policy makers and educators have tried to develop various tools to identify gifted children among minority groups, but their efforts have always ended up in failure due to continuous criticism. Callahan’s study even exhibited the reasons due to which policy makers have failed to identify gifted students among minority groups. One of the main reasons of failure to recognize gifted talent among minority groups is lack of opportunity for developing talent. There are believes that talented individuals even exist in minority groups, but these individuals mostly gain training for basic skill development due to which they don’t gain exposure of critical, analytical and problem solving skill development. Due to this they fail to exhibit their talent and they continue to exhibit and gain training of basic skills which becomes very boring and monotonous. Another problem is that when gifted students are being identified, basic tests such as vocabulary and written English tests are taken. Pupils from the minority groups never get training for these tests thus they fail to exhibit basic skills and are marked as ungifted, though policy makers should concentrate on other talents that these children might have and different tests should be available to identify verbal skills. These issues can be dealt with in several ways, one such way is to expand the range of tests and take different kinds of test. All students are not necessarily gifted in solving mathematical problems or writing essays, students may be gifted in other areas such as music and sports, tests should be designed in such a way so students can exhibit any talent they have. Another solution is to provide examples of gifted students to teachers so they can identify gifted students according to those examples. Another solution to the problem is developing programs that develop talent and gifted individuals so those who do not have the opportunity of being a part of high quality education system can enhance their talents. The problem can even be addressed if talents of children are identified ant an early age, for example: when students are in 2nd grade. To identify talent in minority groups, new tools and tools that already have been used and have proved to be beneficial should be used. Assessment can be based on what children see and experience in the real world, this will even help solve the issue. Continuous supervision of students should take place in order to ensure that the student actually has the talent he has exhibited once or twice and portfolio should be maintained, portfolio should exhibit the talent a student has. Policies and practices such as standardization of tests should be discarded as pupils have varied amount of talents within them. The scope of defining the gifted students should be broadened and curriculum used by teachers should be created in accordance to what is going to be assessed in performance assessment tests (Callahan 2005). The study conducted by Baldwin (2005) exhibits that the real problem lies in the way people such as educators, policy makers and researchers define giftedness (Baldwin 2005). Different groups of individuals have different definitions of Giftedness and they opt for gifted children according to these definitions. Thus to solve the problem of identifying talent in the group of children that represent the minority, a proper definition of giftedness is required. Earlier definitions related to giftedness defined gifted children as those students who have been able to operate in such a manner that they have ended up achieving highest status in academics and were referred to as extraordinarily intelligent. Over the period of years of research, the definitions of giftedness kept on changing which resulted in concerns related to what does actually giftedness means. These concerns have led to huge discussions and research and the validity of how giftedness and intellectuality is defined as been questioned again and again. These concerns have made policy makers and researchers think of creating different tools to measure giftedness in different students that belong from diverse cultures, race and ethnicity. These concerns have even increased the importance of collection of data and critical analysis of the various processes that are used and have been previously used to determine gifted students out of huge number of students that belong to diverse backgrounds. This development of different assessment tests for performance is a continuous process and these processes have been ongoing for several years and are expected to continue for forthcoming years. The continuous development of such measures clearly exhibit a better future for research and development of tools required to differentiate among gifted and non gifted students and these developments have given rise to more researches which is ultimately helping the aim of finding appropriate ways to find the talented students (Baldwin 2005). Works Cited 1. Reis, S.M, and J.S Renzulli. "Myth 1: the Gifted and Talented Constitute One Single Homogeneous Group and Giftedness Is a Way of Being That Stays in the Person Over Time and Experiences." Gifted Child Quarterly. 53.4 (2009): 233-235. Print. 2. O'Neil, John. "Putting Performance Assessment to the Test." Educational Leadership. 49.8 (1992): 14-19. Print. 3. Ford, Donna Y, J J. I. I. I. Harris, Cynthia A. Tyson, and Michelle F. Trotman. "Beyond Deficit Thinking: Providing Access for Gifted African American Students." Roeper Review. 24.2 (2003): 52-58. Print. 4. Gallagher, James J. "The Role of Race in Gifted Education: According to Jim Gallagher." Roeper Review. 27.3 (2005): 135. Print. 5. Margison, Judith, Eric L. Mann, and Erin M. Miller. "Recent Dissertation Research in Gifted Studies." Roeper Review. 28.3 (2006). Print. 6. Pierce, Rebecca L, Cheryll M. Adams, Kristie L. S. Neumeister, Jerrell C. Cassady, Felicia A. Dixon, and Tracy L. Cross. "Development of an Identification Procedure for a Large Urban School Corporation: "identifying Culturally Diverse and Academically Gifted Elementary Students"." Roeper Review. 29.2 (2006): 113-118. Print. 7. Callahan, Carolyn M. "Identifying Gifted Students from Underrepresented Populations." Theory into Practice. 44.2 (2005): 98-104. Print. 8. Baldwin, Alexinia Y. "Identification Concerns and Promises for Gifted Students of Diverse Populations." Theory into Practice. 44.2 (2005): 105-114. Print. Read More