Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

On today's Home School Heartbeat, host Mike Smith and educator Inge Cannon discuss the uses and limitations of standardized testing in determining whether your child is gifted.

Mike Smith:
How would parents know when an assessment is better than testing for a gifted child?


Inge Cannon:
In that case we're using the word assessment to describe the whole package of anecdotal observations, narrative-type things, other people giving us their feedback of interaction with the child, and we put that together almost portfolio-style to describe that child versus test scores. Test scores are limited because they only measure what that particular test is about, and it's very important that parents understand the definition of what those tests' goals are so that they understand what those scores are really telling them.


Mike:
So if a person's child tested at the 99th percentile in the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, that wouldn't necessarily mean that child is gifted and talented, would it?


Inge:
For gifted children, the Iowa Test, the Stanford, the Metropolitan—any of those—the ceiling is too low, meaning that we don't know at the 99th percentile—that only tells me this child is one in a hundred. What I need is the ability to, in a good sense of the word, discriminate a little more closely, because I need to know is he at the 99.9th percentile (in which case he's one out of a thousand) or is he at the 99.99th percentile (in that case he's one out of 10,000).


Mike:
Well, thank you, Inge. I'm Mike Smith.