Gates Gifted Summary

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The contemporary education system in the United States emphasizes labeling students based on their behavior or abilities. Gates explains that labels are essential for educators to effectively identify and accommodate for students’ academic limitations and proficiencies (200). “Gifted” is one prevalent label in the education system that describes a student’s competence. In order for an education system to identify and label a student as gifted, the student must demonstrate exceptional cognitive ability and high levels of aptitude through standardized testing. The traditional academic standard of giftedness is a student who is typically “within the top 2% of standardized IQ scores--in other words, possesses an IQ of approximately 130+” (Page). …show more content…
Gates clarifies that giftedness does not equate to deviance. She references control theory to illustrate the negative effects of labeling on students in general. In sociology, Gates states that control theory may be “associated with labeling, suggesting that the more deviant the labeled person becomes, the further he detaches himself from the population, resulting in social isolation” (201). --- In Gates’s article, she discusses that if a student associate negative perceptions to his or her gifted label, then “increasingly negative behaviors may be exhibited causing social isolation and possibly negative emotional consequences” (201). --- Gates’s research generalizes that poor social relations may be a concern for gifted students because of the effects of …show more content…
Students are labeled as a means for educators to -- to deal with the students’ particular behavior or abilities, but some educators may not have undergone proper training on how to interact with gifted students whether the gifted child is placed in a gifted education program or not. The National Association for Gifted Children references a study that discovered that “58% of teachers have received no professional development focused on teaching academically advanced students in the past few years… This report confirms what many families have known: not all teachers are able to recognize and support gifted learners.”