School & District Management

Identifying Gifted ELLs

By Mary Ann Zehr — October 27, 2009 1 min read
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The U.S. Department of Education has given a $1.6 million grant to the University of South Florida’s college of education to research how to identify English-language learners and students from low socioeconomic levels who are gifted, according to the Tampa Tribune. The grant will fund a program called Recognizing Extraordinary Accomplishments of Children.

Elizabeth Shaunessy, an associate professor for gifted education at the university, plans to research how a nonverbal test, which uses picture patterns to assess intelligence, might increase the participation of ELLs and students from low-income families in gifted programs, the article says.

I feature this grant because it’s one of the few efforts I’ve heard about in a decade of writing about ELLs that recognizes how such students can be evaluated for giftedness.

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A version of this news article first appeared in the Learning the Language blog.