Identifying cognitively gifted ethnic minority children

Four hundred kindergarten children in regular education and 31 kindergarten children identified as gifted were presented a cognitive battery consisting of nine different tasks. Five measures representing the three open-ended tasks were associated with both a significant group difference and the presence of high performing outliers from the regular education sample. When frequency distributions for the two groups were computed based on a total score summed over the five measures, seven of the eight regular education students with the highest score, the upper 2%, were either Black/NonHispanic or White/Hispanic. The upper 2% of the regular education sample performed at a level above 81% of the gifted sample. The data suggest that using a child's performance on a cognitive battery may prove to be effective for identifying gifted minority children who have not previously been identified as having superior cognitive abilities.