Pegnato revisited: using discriminant analysis to identify gifted children

This paper sets out to explain what discriminant analysis is and to walk through a worked example of how it can sharpen the screening methods schools use to spot intellectually gifted students. Pegnato and Birch raised the question of effectiveness and efficiency back in 1959, and the technique shown here speaks directly to both of those concerns.

When the goal is to predict how a child will score on an intelligence test that must be given one-on-one, the strongest signals turn out to be the results the student already produced on group IQ measures and on achievement tests. Those readily available scores do most of the predictive work.

The author is Michael C. Pyryt of the Centre for Gifted Education at the University of Calgary.