Diversity and Gifted Education

The lack of diversity in gifted and talented programs has been a major concern in the extant literature, and as the population of the United States grows more diverse, ways to increase the diversity of the students classified as gifted and talented will likely continue to be a central focus of educators and researchers in the field (e.g., Lamb, 2019). Early work in this area was concentrated on subgroup differences on intelligence test scores, as these tests are frequently used as part of the identification procedure for gifted programs, and students from some ethnic and racial subgroups obtain lower scores on these tests on average. More recent research has focused on (a) documenting the extent of underrepresentation of various racial and ethnic groups in gifted programs, (b) proposing alternative identification mechanisms for increasing the numbers of ethnically diverse students in gifted programs, and (c) changing the education system so that all students, but especially students from underrepresented groups, receive a quality education to mitigate the disparities on criteria for classification as a gifted student.