Using a parent report measure of giftedness to identify culturally diverse preschool children : the Hope scale adapted

The purpose of this study was to validate an adaptation of a culturally sensitive rating scale (The HOPE Scale) in response to various factors contributing to disproportionate representation of minority and low-income students in gifted programs. Parents, rather than teachers, provide open-ended responses, in addition to Likert-type ratings, of their preschool aged children on characteristics of giftedness. Several individual HOPE Scale Items (Items 1, 2, 10, and 13) were positively and significantly correlated (p < .05) with previously established overall measures of cognitive ability from the DAS-II and WPPSI-IV, but the HOPE Scale Total Composite Score was not significantly correlated (p > .05) with the GAI (r = .131), FSIQ (r = .029), or GCA (r = .156). Topic-Modeling was used to detect underlying themes from the examples provided by parents on three selected HOPE Scale open-ended questions. Resulting topics grouped participants and were used to determine whether characteristics reported by parents of high performing children differ based on race/ethnicity or income level. MANOVAs with discriminant analyses as post hoc follow up demonstrated significantly higher performance on traditional measures of cognitive ability (p = .048) among topic groups when parents provided examples of their child performing at remarkably high levels in academics. ANCOVAs and logistic regressions were used to determine whether topic group membership differed based on race/ethnicity or income. Results indicate characteristics reported by parents across the three HOPE Scale items did not significantly differ based on the child’s race/ethnicity (p > .05), but differed significantly based on household income level when parents provided examples of their child demonstrating outstanding talent in a specific school subject after controlling for GAI (p = .017; η2 = .026). Implications, limitations, and recommendations are discussed.