Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In this paper, we report the final results of a three-year randomized controlled trial of Nurturing for a Bright Tomorrow ("Nurturing"), a comprehensive curriculum framework designed to increase the rate of gifted identification among minority students in the Wake County Public School System (Raleigh, NC). Underrepresentation is a persistent challenge to closing the racial achievement gap. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, while 40% of Black and Hispanic students recently were enrolled in schools offering gifted education programs, only 28% ultimately enrolled (Lhamon, 2015). In more than 40 states, Black and Hispanic students were underrepresented in gifted and talented programs (Yoon & Gentry, 2009). And in various studies at the school, district, and state levels, racial and ethnic gaps in representation are reported at various magnitudes (Carman & Taylor, 2009; Lewis, DeCamp-Fritson, Ramage, McFarland, & Archwamety, 2007; M. McBee, 2010; Naglieri & Ford, 2003; Olszewski-Kubilius & Lee, 2011).

Despite increased attention to the magnitude and potential causes of the gap in gifted representation between minority and non-minority students, we know very little about how to address this underrepresentation or, for that matter, how to enhance gifted education more broadly. Our findings help address this gap.

This study contributes to the nascent experimental literature on gifted programming effects through an examination of a unique curricular and professional development framework. In 2014-15, Wake County partnered with Duke University to implement Nurturing in response to chronically-low gifted identification rates among Black and Hispanic students in two-thirds of the district’s elementary schools. Results after two years of the three-year intervention suggest that Nurturing has the potential to formally increase the number of gifted students when the first cohort of participants—kindergarten students in 2014-15—test for gifted identification as 3rd graders in fall 2017. Our preliminary results for this cohort (as 2nd graders) show that students in the treatment group scored higher on the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (0.05-0.10 SD) and had increased odds of being identified as gifted (OR = 1.3-2.2). Most importantly, treatment schools had higher incidences of identified students (IRR= 2.3-5.7)—the outcome Nurturing was primarily designed to achieve.

Our findings have implications for both measurement and policy. First, unlike much gifted education research, we estimate the impact of an intervention across a range of assessments (e.g., Naglieri, CogAT, and Iowa) and in numerous ways in order to measure whether different tests more sensitively identify gifted students across subgroups, particularly Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students. Second, this work contributes to the literature on interventions designed to address the minority gifted identification gap, an issue that is extensively documented but for which few evidence-based interventions exist. Finally, our research-practice partnership between Wake County and Duke University offers a case study for how a collaborative evaluation team iterates over the course of a project and regularly shares preliminary implementation and impact results with stakeholders. We believe this type of collaboration—and others like it—can efficiently and effectively inform policy at the local level.