A Descriptive Analysis of Referral Sources for Gifted Identification Screening by Race and Socioeconomic Status

Despite the vital role of the referral as the “gatekeeper” process through which students become eligible for official evaluation for entry into gifted programs, it remains poorly understood. An examination of the gifted education literature reveals a paucity of research in this area. This is especially troubling and indeed surprising given the field’s well-documented struggle to identify and serve students from minority or low socioeconomic status (SES) families (e.g., Ford, 1998; Frasier, Garcia, & Passow, 1995). A relatively large amount of work has examined possible methods of fairly assessing students who are traditionally underrepresented in programs for the gifted, including assessment schemes based on dynamic assessment (Kirschenbaum, 2004), nonverbal ability tests (Naglieri & Ford, 2003), Gardner’s (1983) theory of multiple intelligences (Sarouphim, 1999), compensatory policies such as lowering IQ cutoff requirements for students from underrepresented groups (Hunsaker, 1994), and performance-based assessments (VanTassel-Baska, Johnson, & Avery, 2002). These procedures may hold great promise for identifying and serving students from these groups. However, most school districts require that a student be referred or nominated before being formally assessed for gifted program placement. Students that do not receive a referral will be unable to enter the program no matter which formal assessment procedure is used. The referral process is an obvious potential source of unfairness in the entrance process. It is essential that reliable information be made available so that current practices can be evaluated and perhaps modified. For the remainder of this article, the terms referral and nomination will be used interchangeably to describe the process of designating a student as potentially gifted. Once a student has received a nomination or referral, he or she is legally required to undergo official testing for gifted program placement, assuming that the student’s parents consent. The testing process will be referred to as evaluation or screening throughout the remainder of the paper. A Descriptive Analysis of Referral Sources for Gifted Identification Screening by Race and Socioeconomic Status