Effect of Local Norms on Racial and Ethnic Representation in Gifted Education

Oct 15, 2026

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The study examines how gifted identification using local normative criteria—or combining national and school-level norms—could change representation rates for students from African American and Latinx families. It addresses disproportionality arising when gifted decisions rely on national comparisons that require scores above set percentiles. Using a large dataset, the article evaluates whether local building-level norms improve equity in gifted education participation while responding to broader concerns about excellence gaps and long-documented underrepresentation.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages18

Reading Time45 min

AccessFree to download

Quantifying Disproportionality

Disproportional representation methods

Racial and ethnic representation in gifted education

Disparities and excellence gaps

Local norms and identification approaches

School-level and combined norms

AERA Open April-June 2019, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 1–18 DOI: 10. 1177/2332858419848446 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2019. [http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Effect of Local Norms on Racial and Ethnic Representation in Gifted Education Scott J. Peters University of Wisconsin–Whitewater Karen Rambo-Hernandez West Virginia University Matthew C. Makel Duke University Michael S. Matthews University of North Carolina–Charlotte Jonathan A. Plucker Johns Hopkins University Educators have sought to understand and address the disproportional representation of students from certain student subgroups in gifted education. Most gifted identification decisions are made with national comparisons where students must score above a certain percentage of test takers. However, this approach is not always consistent with the overall goal of gifted education. Scholars have long argued for the use of local normative criteria to increase the diversity of students identified for gifted services, and although some districts across the country have applied such recommendations, little research has been carried out. In this study, we use a large data set to assess the extent to which identifying gifted students with either school-level norms or a combination of national and school-level norms would improve gifted education representation rates for students who are from African American and Latinx families. Apreprint of this registered report and this project’spreregistration documentation are available at [https://osf.io/z2egy/](https://osf.io/z2egy/). Keywords: assessment, descriptive analysis, diversity, equity, gifted education, hierarchical linear modeling, policy analysis Disproportionality rates have been reported along racial/ ethnic lines in areas including school discipline, average test scores, hiring practices, college enrollment, and a host of other important student outcomes (e.g., Cruz & Rodl, 2018; Gupta-Kagan, 2017; U.S. Department of Education, 2016; Williams, Bryant-Mallory, Coleman, Gotel, & Hall, 2017) . Furthermore, disproportionality is evident in rates of enrollment in K–12 gifted education programs by certain racial, ethnic, income, language, and disability subgroups (e.g., Peters, Gentry, Whiting, & McBee, 2019; Yoon & Gentry, 2009), and gifted education has been challenged on the basis of equity and corresponding concerns about whether its practices exacerbate inequality across student subgroups (e.g., Garland, 2013) . Much of this criticism arises from the observation that students served by gifted education programs tend to be from European American, Asian American, or upper-income backgrounds—an observation that has been documented since at least the 1970s (Peters et al., 2019; Yoon & Gentry, 2009) . Not surprisingly, gifted identification disparities occur alongside large differences in rates of advanced performance among subgroups of students, a phenomenon known as excellence gaps (Plucker, Hardesty, & Burroughs, 2013) . For example, on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics assessment for Grade 4 students, 2% of African American and 3% of Hispanic1 students scored atthe advanced level, whereas 24% of Asian American and 11% of European American students2 scored in the Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages ([https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage](https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-a

FAQs

Why does the article focus on local normative criteria in gifted education?

Most gifted identification decisions rely on national comparisons, which may not align with the broader goals of gifted education. The article argues local norms could better support equitable representation.

How does the study measure disproportionality?

It reviews three related quantification approaches: aggregate numbers, enrollment relative to base rate, and conditional probability of identification.

What identification strategies are compared in the study?

The study compares gifted identification based on school-level norms versus a combination of national and school-level norms to see how each affects representation for African American and Latinx students.

Oct 15, 2026

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