Development of the Short-Form Parent Rating Scale (SFPRS) for Screening Gifted Children

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to develop a parent rating scale targeted at screening children in terms of giftedness. 292 parents of gifted and typical students participated in the study. Of the parents, 170 were female while 122 were male. In the study, parents were asked to indicate the prominent characteristics of their gifted children and 10 items were identified after the characteristics were examined by two experts. It was seen to that the items determined were compatible with the items in the parent rating scales in the literature. Content, construct and criterion-related validities were examined while the Cronbach alpha value as a sign of reliability was also examined. Content validity was approved by two experts, Kendall’s coefficient of concordance was calculated to determine inter-expert agreement and found to be 0.80. Confirmatory factor analysis results also supported a one-factor solution for an 8-item instrument. A comparison of scores given by parents of gifted and typical students also revealed a significant difference between two groups of the parents in favor of the parents having gifted children. The Cronbach’s alpha value was found to be 0.78, an acceptable value for internal consistency. Therefore, the Short-Form Parent Rating Scale (SFPRS) may be used to screen practically gifted children by the parents without using boring and long instruments. In addition, not checking convergent and divergent validity, test-retest reliability and measurement invariance are seen as the limitations of this paper.