Identification of Gifted and Talented Students

Selecting students for programs remains one of the key concerns in gifted and talented education. Invariably, discussions about gifted and talented students revert to questions about who these students are and how they are identified. It is clear that there is no one way to approach the selection process and no one measurement technique which will magically arrive at a listing of gifted and tal-ented students. However, basic guidelines and procedures have evolved over the past sixty years which make the process of identifying these students possible. AN EVOLVING DEFINITION OF GIFTEDNESS It is inadvisable to identify students for gifted and talented programs without first developing a definition of gifted and talented students. Over the years, the prevailing definition has evolved from one based strictly on I.Q. as determined by an individual intelli-gence test to one based on multiple talents. In the 1920’s, Terma