Gifted Education in Lebanese Schools by Sara El Khoury & Anies Al-Hroub

Author:Sara El Khoury & Anies Al-Hroub
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

3.5.1 Misconceptions and Misdiagnosis

There is a major underrepresentation of gifted students in schools. Ford and Harmon (2002) stated that the main reason for this underrepresentation is, as he calls it, a “cognitive deficit perspective” which influences the access of gifted, culturally diverse students into gifted programs. This perspective assumes that students, who are economically disadvantaged or who come from minority populations, are “cognitively inferior,” because they fail to meet the traditional criteria for placement in gifted programs (i.e., scoring on the 97th percentile or above), and as a result, these students are underrepresented in gifted programs. This underrepresentation is estimated to be about 30–70% relative to their percentage in the population (Gabelko & Sosniak, 2002). If so, this implies that most schools are using this narrow and limiting cognitive deficit hypothesis definition of giftedness and intelligence (Ford et al., 2008). Bernal (2002) concurs with this and adds that this definition has major limitations because it does not take into consideration differing cultural factors in determining gifted cognitive abilities. Because of this continuing widespread belief, “identification procedures in most school districts (about 90%) still heavily rely on the scores of standardized tests, a practice that limits the access of culturally diverse students to programs for the gifted and keeps the demographics of these programs mostly White” (Ford & Harmon, 2001, p. 62). This presents a big problem for gifted minority students. According to Sarouphim and Maker (2010), scholars have called for a paradigm shift in identification procedures.

This is not the only problem. There is also the issue of inadequate policies and practices that also plays a role in the underrepresentation of gifted students from minority groups. Some policies in the United States, for example, require that gifted education screening must first begin with a teacher referral, and this poses a problem because teachers (even culturally diverse teachers) under-refer minority students for gifted services (Colangelo & Davis, 2003). This is problematic especially if teacher referral is the only recruitment step, because teacher referrals are often subjective and rely heavily on individual expectations and teachers’ perceptions of students (Colangelo & Davis, 2003). It is even more problematic if the teachers themselves are unclear about what defines a gifted student and if there is no general consensus surrounding the definition of giftedness.

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