How valid and reliable are teachers’ assessments of gifted students?

Abstract

Teachers' perceptions, attitudes, and opinions about students, curricula, or evaluation methods contribute to the development of students’ talents. Thus, researchers often collect data from teachers to identify gifted students, determine educational practices to meet the students’ needs and assess gifted education programs. Researchers often develop measurement tools or utilize existing ones to collect valid and reliable data from teachers. This systematic literature review screened online databases to investigate measurement tools for teachers developed from 2017 to 2024. We combined the keywords “scale”, “instrument”, “questionnaire”, “inventory”, “gifted,” and "teacher" to screen Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. We categorized the measurement tools based on their intended use and analyzed seventeen instruments across themes including identification/nomination, attitude-behavior-perception, and knowledge and opinion. Nearly half of these studies employed exploratory or confirmatory factor analysis for construct validity, although some relied on the more superficial face validity. Overall, the studies demonstrated high reliability and validity, but simple analyses should be repeated to further enhance the robustness of measurement instruments.

Keywords

• Questionnaire
• Scale
• Systematic literature review
• Teacher evaluation.

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