Detection of High Abilities: An Empirically Evidenced Alternative to Biased Detection

Students with high ability (HA), due to their differential characteristics, need to receive a specific educational response for the adequate development of their potential. Thus, they must be detected and then identified, but many of these students (around 9.5%, based on prevalences of domain-specific definitions) remain unidentified, especially among girls. The low detection of highly able students raises the need to establish more objective and efficient criteria. Thus, the objective of this study is to analyze whether the use of objective tests in the procedure increases the number of male and female students detected with HA. To detect students with HA, the general intelligence assessment instrument Matrices-TAI has been applied to students from the first to the third year of Compulsory Secondary Education in different educational centers in the Community of the Canary Islands (N = 1216). The results show that in official data, only 1.17% of HA students (0.89% of girls and 1.44% of boys) have been identified, while 9.21% (8.10% of girls and 10.35% of boys) have a higher intelligence in this convenience sample, coinciding with the percentages of talent found in the literature. In conclusion, in our sample, universal screening with a rigorous intelligence test identified a substantially larger proportion of students, including girls, than current nomination-based procedures appear to capture in administrative statistics, suggesting that such screening may reduce gender disparities in identification.