Identifying Cognitively Gifted Minority Students in Preschool

Abstract

Preschool children were administered a screening battery consisting of nine different cognitive tasks. The participants were tracked in the public school database. Based on the children’s first-grade educational status, 2 groups were formed: one consisting of children who were in regular education and the other composed of children who were in the gifted/talented program. The children’s preschool screening scores, summed over both the identification-tasks subset and the generating-tasks subset, enabled the identification of high-performing outliers from the regular education sample who performed very well compared to the school-identified gifted sample. However, a majority of minority students among the high-performing outliers were only identified with the generating measure. The superior first-grade achievement performance of 5 of these 7 and the finding that 3 of the 7 had been placed in the gifted program in second grade, attested to the effectiveness of this measure for identifying cognitively gifted minority preschoolers.