Teacher Identification of Students for Gifted Programs: Nominations to a Summer School for Highly Gifted Students

When schools look for highly gifted students to place in enrichment programs, they often start by asking teachers who the strongest candidates are. This study looked at how well that practice actually works. At German college-prep high schools (the Gymnasium), teachers put forward names of students for the summer sessions run by the German Pupils Academy. To judge the quality of those teacher decisions, Heinz Neber compared them against two other sources: scores on a cognitive ability test, and nominations the students made for themselves.

On one measure the teachers did well. Every student they singled out turned out to meet the psychometric threshold for high giftedness. Not a single false negative slipped through on that front, at least among the students teachers chose to name.

The problem showed up on the other side of the ledger. Teacher nominations were effective but not efficient. Alongside the genuinely gifted students, teachers also forwarded a sizable group of candidates who did not clear the test criteria for high giftedness. Students who nominated themselves had the same issue, producing a large share of names that psychometric testing would not support.

What explained whether a student was actually willing to sign up for the Pupils Academy was less about raw ability and more about motivation. Variables like self-efficacy, a student's belief in their own capacity to succeed, carried most of the weight in that decision. And when it came to judging giftedness, the students' own choices were considerably more accurate than what the teachers produced.

The takeaway for anyone running a nomination process is fairly concrete. Teachers would make better calls if they gathered more than their own impressions. Asking students how they perceive their own abilities, and what draws them toward a gifted program in the first place, would give the selection process information it currently tends to miss.