Gifted Identification Series #7: The Importance of Parental Insights in Gifted Education

So far, we’ve collected several data points for our referred student to consider his or her eligibility for an academic gifted program: nationally-normed and standardized ability and achievement tests, a gifted behavioral checklist, and gifted products or performance tasks such as writing samples, math problem-solving activities, etc. Another thing to consider collecting is parent input. Parents are their child’s first teacher, and they know their child best. It is hard for parents to compare their child’s academic performance to their child’s peers because they don’t really have access to observe that in schools. However, parents can tell us many things about their child that schools likely wouldn’t know. For example…

• what type of learner their child is at home,
• what hobbies or activities their child participates in outside of school,
• if s/he is a voracious reader,
• if s/he builds Legos all the time,
• how does s/he solve a problem at home,
• if s/he has taken enrichment classes outside of school,
• if s/he has any medical or behavioral concerns that could impact testing, and
• if there is anything going on at home that would be good for the eligibility team to know, etc.

All of this parental information can be gathered through a parent questionnaire, or Parent Input Form. Most parents are more than happy to share in-depth information about their child as a learner at home. Sometimes, though, parents aren’t sure what to say about their child to the school. What should gifted personnel do when parents do not respond thoroughly- or at all- to the parent questionnaire? I’ll share a story about this next week, and it’s connected to my personal 11^th grade gifted testing…