Multiple Intelligences and the Gifted Identification of African-American Students

There have been three national reports addressing giftedness: Education of the Gifted and Talented: Report to the Congress of the United States by the U.S. Commissioner of Education (1972) AKA the Marland Report; The National Report on Identification: Assessment and Recommendations for Comprehensive Identification of Gifted and Talented Youth (1982) AKA the National Report on Identification; and National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent (1993) AKA National Excellence. All have documented the underrepresentation of African-American students in programs for the gifted and talented and the disproportionate reliance on standardized intelligence and achievenent tests for gifted and talented program selection. Traditionally, African-American students have not performed well on standardized tests and, as a consequence, have not been selected to participate in gifted and talented programs proportionate to their representation in the student population. This exacerbates and perpetuates the underrepresentation of African-American students in gifted and talented programs. Pluralistic assessment (PA), in which criteria in addition to standardized intelligence and achievement tests (portfolios, inventories, product evaluation, norming for subpopulations, case studies, etc.) are used to identify gifted students, has been advocated as a possible supplement to, or alternative to standardized tests. An assessment instrument based on Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences (MI) theory, the Teele Inventory of Multiple Intelligences (TIMI) may assist in meeting PA goals and may be a possible alternative to traditional intelligence and achievement tests for identifying gifted African-American students. Generally, this study addressed the use of standardized tests to identify African-American urban fourth grade students who may possess the potential to participate in gifted and talented programs. Specifically, it sought to determine, through cross-validation of a multiple intelligences instrument, whether the subscales of a MI instrument could identify a statistically significant greater number of potentially gifted African-American urban fourth grade students than the subscales of a general intelligence (g) instrument. The TIMI was the MI instrument used in this study. And, the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT) was the (g) factor instrument used in this study. This study found that there was no statistically significant difference in the ability of the TIMI or OLSAT to identify gifted students in general. However, the TIMI consistently identified more gifted students than the OLSAT. Also, there was a statistically significant difference in the ability of the TIMI's TIMI 3 subscale (intrapersonal intelligence) and the OLSAT to identify gifted African-American students and to identify gifted students as a function of race. Because of the small subject size, caution should be utilized in interpreting these results. There was a statistically significant difference in the ability of the TIMI's TIMI 4 (spatial intelligence) and TIMI 6 (bodily-kinesthetic intelligence) subscales and the OLSAT to identify gifted students as a function of sex.