Native American/Indigenous Students

Effectiveness of Current Identification and Assessment Practices

Unfortunately, there is a higher overrepresentation of American Indian children in special education programs and services within all disability categories. Some specific categories include "specific learning disabilities, speech or language impairment, mental retardation, emotional disturbance, deaf-blindness, and traumatic brain injury" (Castellano & Frazier, 2011, p. 77). While it could look as a positive that these children are being identified, there could be misrepresentation for some of those students who could be considered gifted, but are pushed into the special education sphere. One challenge that could arise in identification is the fact that in some American Indian tribal languages, they do not have a word that corresponds to gifted or giftedness (Castellano & Frasier, 2011, p. 82). Without a word that is associated with a definition, it can be hard to find characteristics that would help identify those specific students. Instead, they chose to look at evidence of outstanding ability, such as physical/athletic abilities, or how artistic students are, rather than their linguistic abilities, leadership skills, or problem-solving proficiency (Castellano & Frazier, 2011, p. 82). As is good practice, there are multiple methods used to identify gifted students for programs. Methods include standardized achievement tests, teacher and parent checklists of gifted characteristics, teacher/parent/peer/self nomination, grades, performance/product evaluation, and any other available assessment data (Castellano & Frazier, 2011, p. 83). However, the school districts tend to use standardized intelligence tests as the primary identified, which draws heavily on one racial/economic group based on the norms of the assessment. Many of the assessments contain cultural bias, particularly in regards to language. For example, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Revised Edition (WISC-R), is biased against the American Indian language in the verbal section, since the culture of American Indian language relies mainly on ". . . nonverbal communication, undetailed verbal accounts, noncompetitiveness, soft speech patterns, and mythology, rather than science" (Florey & Tafoya, 1988, p. 2). This is seen in many other assessments, where the verbal sections tend to disadvantage Native American students, as well as the fact that many of their values are not reflected in the current assessment tools. Therefore, one assessment that has been used and described as more culturally fair is the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, because it relies heavily on nonverbal skills and keys in on information processing, as well as includes a performance section involving block design, object assembly, and coding which works well with American Indian students since they understand symbolic and visual imagery (Florey & Tafoya, 1988, p. 3). Without the correct assessment tools, it can become very difficult to correctly identify any student, let alone students in a special population. Therefore, it is imperative to find assessments that are free or close to free of cultural bias, and allows for students to have the opportunity to correctly showcase their knowledge, skills, and talents. Many factors continue to contribute to the unsuitable assessment practices such as "neglect of subcultural values, abilities, and knowledge in assessment instruments and procedures; use of exclusive training in application of middle class measurement instruments; belief that object measurement is the only way to conduct assessment; inadequate attention to problems of motivation and negative reactions to the examiner; and failure to include sufficient numbers of minority students" (Florey & Tafoya, 1988, p. 3). In other words, not having values that are seen across cultures and subcultures, and lack of training and knowledge of the assessments being given, as well as the lack of minority students being given the opportunity to be screened and assessed will ultimately lead to the misidentification of Native American and Indigenous gifted students.