An Empirically-Based Proposal for Screening in the Early Identification of Intellectually Gifted Students

The lack of instruments to identify intellectually gifted children at an early age may be a contributing factor towards the limited availability of research studies on these children within the field of developmental psychology. The goal of this research, therefore, was to create a simple, reliable, and inexpensive screening method for identifying gifted children from 4 to 6 years of age. A sample of 138 children from ages 6 to 8 were presented for assessment at the Huerta del Rey Center in Valladolid, Spain. Parents were asked to complete a questionnaire documenting the age at which their child acquired specific developmental and learning skills/behaviors. Concurrently, these children were tested by professionals on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test (Terman-Merrill, L-M Form). Using logistical regression techniques, the study identified which behaviors predicted giftedness as judged by an IQ of 130 or above. This screening method is now in the validation phase and is being applied in 12 countries. It has been translated from Spanish into the Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Russian, and English languages. The results from this project were published by the Spanish Ministry of Education, and it was developed and coordinated under the aegis of the General Sub-director of Special Education. The recent results obtained in Spain seem to verify the reliability of this screening method.