Misconceptions about the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test: A Commentary of Concerns and Disagreements

Black and Hispanic students are undeniably underidentified as gifted and underrepresented in gifted education. The underrepresentation of the two largest groups of "minority" students is long-standing, dating several decades, and is a serious area of contention. Most debates focus on the efficacy of traditional intelligence tests with verbal, quantitative, and nonverbal scales compared to intelligence tests that are nonverbal when identifying underserved gifted students. Test developers; researchers; federal, state, and local government officials; policymakers; administrators; and educators have debated different solutions to the problem of underrepresentation of minorities in gifted educational programs for decades. Controversies surrounding how to equitably identify these gifted students abound, and arguments are quite polemic and entrenched; nonetheless, in many instances gifted Hispanic and Black students are often disproportionally denied access to gifted education because of the methods and instruments used. In this article, we review a study by Giessman, Gambrell, and Stebbins regarding one Nonverbal Test of General Ability (NNAT2), which has been widely used for identification of gifted non-White students. We address concerns about conclusions raised by Giessman and coauthors and present cautions about the problems involved in reporting archival data.