Underrepresentation in Gifted Education Revisited: The Promise of Single-Group Summaries and Meta-Analytic QuantCrit

Abstract

Many statistical measures are commonly used to document the persistence of inequity within gifted education (Young, Young, & Ford, 2017; Ford, 2013; Hodges et al., 2018; Yoon & Gentry, 2009). Thus, in response to the challenges presented by Peters (2021), we contend that an approach that considers critical race theory as a lens for the design, analysis, and interpretation of representation data in gifted education is necessary but remains elusive. In this commentary, we present an example of an alternative analysis (i.e., single-group summary). Borrowing from the work of Ford (2013) and Lamb et al. (2019), we examined Black student representation in gifted education meta-analytically using data from the Office of Civil Rights Data Collection to provide an example of the utility of single-group summaries. A single-group summary is described as the estimation of population parameters for a single group on a particular outcome. We aim to present a novel application of QuantCrit and meta-analytic thinking to support more informed and equitable decisions in gifted education. Using data from the Office of Civil Rights Data Collection database, we computed the relative difference in composition index (RDCI), the Equity Index (EI), and the Inequity Score (IS) in the current single-group summary.