Providing access for culturally diverse gifted students: from deficit to dynamic thinking

Theory Into Practice, Summer, 2003 by Donna Y. Ford, Tarek C. Grantham

Educators who select the first two viewpoints feel an obligation to make substantive changes in assessment and educational practices. These views consider the influence of the environment on test performance, thus adhering to dynamic thinking and the belief that intelligence is malleable. However, the last explanation rests in deficit thinking. It is an example of blaming the victim. Educators who support this view abdicate any responsibility for minority students' lower test scores (see Herrnstein & Murray, 1994; Jensen, 1981; Rushton, 2000) because of the belief that genetics determines intelligence, and that intelligence is static or fixed.

Dynamic Thinking 2: Testing and Assessment

Much data indicate that intelligence tests are effective at identifying middle-class White students as gifted but can ignore those students who (a) perform poorly on paper-and-pencil tasks conducted in artificial or lab-like settings; (b) do not perform well on culturally loaded tests (Kauffman, 1994); (c) have learning and/or cognitive styles that are different from White students (Shade, Kelly, & Oberg, 1997); (d) have test anxiety (Ford, 1996); or (e) have low achievement motivation (Ford, 1996).

Until such issues as these are resolved, the most promising instruments for assessing the strengths of Black students include nonverbal tests of intelligence, such as the Naglieri Non-Verbal Ability Test and Raven's Matrix Analogies Tests, which are considered less culturally loaded than traditional tests (see Kaufman, 1994; Saccuzzo, Johnson, & Guertin, 1994). Accordingly, these are more likely to capture the cognitive strengths of Black students. Saccuzzo et al., for instance, identified substantively more Black and Hispanic students using Raven's than a traditional test, and reported that, "50% of the non-White children who had failed to qualify based on a WISC-R qualified with the Raven" (p. 10). They went on to state, "the Raven is a far better measure of pure potential than tests such as the WISC-R, whose scores depend heavily on acquired knowledge" (p. 10).

Educators should understand that nonverbal tests assess intelligence nonverbally. This is not to say that students are nonverbal; rather, the tests give students opportunities to demonstrate their intelligence without the confounding influence of differential language, vocabulary, and academic exposure.

Deficit Thinking 3: Policies and Practices

Procedural and policy issues also contribute to the underrepresentation of minority students in gifted education. Specifically, teachers systematically underrefer minority students for gifted education services (Saccuzzo et al., 1994). Ford (1995) found many Black students with high achievement scores (e.g., 95th to 99th percentile) were underrepresented in gifted education because teachers did not refer them for screening. In other words, when teacher referral is the first (or only) recruitment step, gifted minority students are likely to be underrepresented. Other policies relate to the items included in matrices and how they are weighted. For instance, some schools include attendance as one criterion. This information may be used even if minority and White students have different attendance patterns; the same applies to other criteria (e.g., behavior, number of failing or low grades). Some districts even have sibling policies--students get points toward identification if they have a sibling who has been identified as gifted! Finally, schools can boast of using multiple criteria to make placement decisions, but IQ of achievement test scores may count for 50% or more of the total possible points. In this regard, the matrix becomes pseudoscientific, a smoke screen.