Assignment 21 - Grace Payne

A question that has struck me for a long time has been, how exactly do we determine what kind of students are "gifted and talented" and who aren't? And also, is the first grade really the best time to determine that? And finally, if students who otherwise wouldn't have been labelled as gifted and talented (when they determine it in the first grade) were put into that gifted and talented class, would they succeed or fail?

This is important to me, because I barely made the gifted and talented program. I got called to be in the program a day after my brother, which made me think it may have been kind of a pity thing. Also, I barely made it into the program at Tates Creek Middle School. They had to bend some rules and use my scores from third grade to get me in. But now, I consider myself to be one of the top kids at Henry Clay. Because of that, I've always wondered what these "gifted and talented" labels really mean. Can test scores on a few standardized tests really tell you who is so much smarter than the person who didn't score well? If you put someone with a really high work ethic in the Academy, despite them not having the appropriate test scores, would they fail out? It's always seemed unlikely to me, therefore it's something I'd like to research in the future.

To find an answer to this question wouldn't be terribly difficult, but it's extremely time-consuming. You'd have to watch a child from the time they're in first grade to the end of school. A smaller experiment could be done as well, watching a kid from their freshman year to their senior year. It's also possible that we just raise all elementary aged kids in a gifted and talented environment, and then determine come middle school the kids that need other classes. Other effects would have to be researched as well, such as social pressures. (would someone feel dumb or less than their peers if they had to drop out of an advanced class, therefore pressuring them to stay in a class they shouldn't be in?)

It's a long string of questions with a lot of answers, but it's one I would be interested in finding an answer to.