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. A preprint of this registered report and this project’s preregistration documentation are available at https://osf.io/z2egy/ .

In 1988, Van Galen proposed two distinct categories to describe homeschooling parents – ideologues and pedagogues. Her model has been widely cited in the homeschooling literature. In the 30 years since the introduction of these identifiers, homeschooling in the United States has experienced tremendous growth due to a number of intersecting contextual and societal events, which suggests a need to re-examine Van Galen’s initial binary categories. Education reform, enacted through standards-based curriculum and assessment, school choice presented as a mechanism to improve the educational experiences of the country’s most vulnerable students, greater acceptance of homeschooling as a legitimate school choice, and the diversification of families choosing homeschooling as an alternative to traditional forms of K–12 schooling have all contributed to homeschooling’s explosive growth and a corresponding need to revisit homeschooling’s conceptual framework. This article proposes an enhanced framework for defining homeschooling, which better reflects the what of school and how of schooling that contemporary homeschooling families employ.

We evaluated the effects of one year of schoolwide cluster grouping on the academic achievement growth of gifted and non-identified elementary students using a piecewise multilevel growth model. Scores from 186 non-identified and 68 gifted students’ Measures of Academic Progress Reading and Math scores were examined over three school years. In 2008–2009 within-class ability grouping was used. In 2009–2010 schoolwide cluster grouping was implemented. In 2010–2011 students once again were grouped only within classrooms by ability and students identified as gifted were spread across all classrooms at each grade level. Results suggest that schoolwide cluster grouping influenced student performance in the year following its implementation, but only for mathematics and not the area of reading.

The label ‘gifted’ has been a source of contention for decades, possibly because it seems to imply a desirable status that is mysteriously granted to some yet remains unavailable to others. Some writers have suggested that the term should be abandoned altogether, though a replacement that retains the same utility for classification purposes and delivery of services remains elusive. We asked 106 parents of gifted learners about their usage of the term ‘gifted’ to learn more about when they perceive the term to be useful and when or why they avoid using it. The majority of respondents reported avoiding the use of the gifted label in conversations with others who were not labelled. Findings suggest that these parents felt they or their children would be judged negatively by others if the parents used the term ‘gifted’, and that in many cases, they used alternate language or (for twice-exceptional children) gave priority to describing their child’s disability. Respondents who did choose to use the term framed their decision in terms of a need to educate other parents about giftedness as an important aspect of individual differences.

Current practices in study design and data analysis have led to low reproducibility and replicability of findings in fields such as psychology, medicine, biology, and economics. Because gifted education research relies on the same underlying statistical and sociological paradigms, it is likely that it too suffers from these problems. This article discusses the origin of the poor replicability and introduces a set of open science practices that can increase the rigor and trustworthiness of gifted education’s scientific findings: preregistration, open data and open materials, registered reports, and preprints. Readers are directed to Internet resources for facilitating open science. To model these practices, a pre peer-review preprint of this article is available at https://psyarxiv.com/nhuv3/ .

Blogs have become a go-to information resource for members of online communities. In this qualitative study we applied uses and gratifications theory (U>) to analyze the experiences and perceptions of four mothers of gifted children who maintain blogs about their homeschooling experiences. Data suggest that this novel context and population did not yield different categories of gratification; however, not all prior categories were represented among this relatively narrow sample. Results support findings from prior research in other contexts suggesting that bloggers find gratification from self-expression, social interaction, information exchange, maintaining community, and recording life events.