Gifted Education

Measuring Intelligence and Defining Giftedness

Intelligence testing was one focus of the movement that established psychology as a discipline in the [Page 407]late 19th century. Sir Francis Galton based his measures of mental processes on the assumption, since found to be invalid, that there was a correlation between high intelligence and high sensory discrimination. James Cattell experimented with sensory-motor measures to create a battery of tests intended to evaluate mental ability. During the same period, H. Ebbinghaus and others in Germany were creating tests of memory, computation skills, sentence completion, and reading skills to help teachers evaluate the academic aptitude of schoolchildren.

In 1905, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon created a scale to determine the intelligence levels of schoolchildren in Paris, specifically to identify lower functioning children. The Binet-Simon scale measured general mental development, using tasks similar to the German tests. Lewis Terman revised and standardized the Binet-Simon scale in 1916, and introduced the concept of the intelligence quotient or IQ as the ratio of mental age divided by chronological age. David Wechsler studied the standardized tests available in the 1930s and created the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale made up of eight subtests. Wechsler developed additional scales for children, for preschool and primary school children, and for adults.

Critics of the Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler scales have questioned the underlying assumptions in these assessments about the nature of intelligence, and have suggested that intelligence is a broader concept than these tests measure. Howard Gardner has described eight types of intelligence: linguistic, mathematical-logical, spatial-visual, musical, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. Robert Emmons has added spiritual intelligence to this list. Critics have also suggested that intelligence tests are culturally biased, making it difficult to identify gifted students from immigrant and refugee families, from lower-income families, or from racial and ethnic minorities within the United States.

Another approach to identification focused on achievement scores. Gifted children's scores on grade-level exams could demonstrate mastery of material expected of their age peers, but provided no measure of their full capabilities. In 1980, Duke University began the Talent Identification Program (TIP), allowing high-ability fourth- through seventh-grade students to take college entrance exams. The results of these tests provided a more complete picture of the gifted student's abilities.

The current approach to identification of gifted children in the United States stems from the definition of giftedness in the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1988. Giftedness, as defined in the act, is “Students, children, or youth who give evidence of high achievement capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity,” or in specific academic fields, and who need services and activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities. One of the initial purposes of the Javits Act was to fund projects that improve the identification of low-income and minority gifted learners. The multiple-criteria eligibility model developed by Javits-funded projects has been adopted by many states because of its effectiveness in identifying those underserved populations. In this model, a combination of identification instruments, including teacher observation, achievement test scores, and standardized intelligence tests, are used to gather evidence of high achievement capability.

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