Identifying Hispanic Gifted Children: A Screening

Abstract

Identification of Hispanic children for gifted programs, particularly those in a rural environment, has been problematic. The question still remains as to what are effective identifying procedures to screen Hispanic students. Specifically, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between standardized test scores and teacher ratings of student behaviors. Thirty-two Mexican-American students and 23 general education teachers from a small, rural school district in South-Central Florida served as the study participants. Fourteen correlations were calculated involving Stanford Reading and Stanford Math scores with the teacher ratings. Nine correlations were significant (9/14=64%). The Academic Checklist scores and Intellectual scores from the teacher ratings correlated the highest with the Stanford Math scores. The Math portion of the Stanford test may be less linguistically biased. Almost one fourth of the teacher rating items seemed to reflect an Anglo-American bias. Those items which seemed to reflect cultural or linguistic bias are discussed.