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Groundbreaking New Book for Gifted Coordinators and School Administrators
💡 Identify Gifted Students ACCURATELY with Our New Book
If you’re a gifted coordinator or a school administrator, then you care about making sure that students get the best education possible. While that can be difficult when it comes to gifted kids, just identifying those students is often its own challenge, especially when there are data from a variety of assessment instruments and/or multiple test cycles to sort through. That’s why we’re pleased to announce the publication of a new book that can help: The Accurate Identification of Gifted Students: Standardizing Test Results across Diverse Measures of Ability and Achievement.
🔍 The Identification Challenge
Most school districts use an identification matrix to evaluate test data for gifted identification, generally assigning matrix points to different kinds of test scores, which are then converted to percentiles. But this is problematic because ability and achievement tests are scored on different scales, and percentiles are not equal interval measures. This creates a situation in which students who are gifted are not identified, and students who would be fine with the standard curriculum are falsely identified. But there’s a way to account for that, and the method in The Accurate Identification of Gifted Students explains how.
✨ A Meaningful Solution
With the help of any standard spreadsheet software (such as Excel), you can use the method in this book to calculate a z-score for each student, which accurately accounts for all of the various test data available, including not just ability and achievement test scores but also other screening methods as well, such as portfolios, teacher recommendations, and parent nominations. Z-scores also account for a single test with multiple cycles, such as achievement testing that is done in the fall and then repeated in winter and spring. Creating z-scores is a way of accurately calculating scores so that each test score is weighted correctly.
🧠 The Genius of Z-Scores
Z-scores represent where students are in relation to one another, giving them a ranking within the local population. This is important because a student who might need a more challenging curriculum in one school district may not need it in a different district. Finding out which students actually need a different level of challenge than what is being taught to the average student in the district makes all the difference in whether or not a child receives an appropriate educational experience.
📚 The Book
The Accurate Identification of Gifted Students is a quick read (saving educators precious time, which there never seems to be enough of!), but it provides a groundbreaking method that will change the way gifted students are identified. We all want our gifted children to thrive, and this book is an important step in making that wish a reality.
The Accurate Identification of Gifted Students: Standardizing Test Results across Diverse Measures of Ability and Achievement
By Sharon Ryan
$15.00