Session 2
Assessment and Identification of Gifted and 2E Individuals
Lisa Hancock, MA
Parents, educators, and various professionals who work with gifted children increasingly
find themselves needing to understand what type of testing can best help explain a particular
child’s academic performance, behavior, or social-emotional functioning. As children progress
through school, undiagnosed disabilities often become a greater challenge as the level of
academic difficulty increases, and parents and teachers are puzzled at what appears to be a
significant change in the child’s ability level or motivation. Gifted children who may have found
their earlier school experience to be “easy” can experience frustration, anxiety, and low selfesteem
as they struggle with these hidden challenges, and behavioral problems and
underachievement often result.
This session explains neuropsychological assessment measures, and both their uses and
limits in the identification of giftedness and multiple exceptionalities. Areas covered include:
• Cognitive ability
• Attention and executive functioning
• Auditory processing
• Expressive and receptive language functions
• Visual and verbal learning and memory
• Visual spatial functions
• Visual motor functions
• Writing skills
• Reading skills
• Mathematics
• Social-emotional functioning
• Sensory-motor processing
Special considerations in assessing disadvantaged, underserved and English language
learners will be discussed. Information will be provided regarding instances where measures
necessitate concurrent or subsequent referrals to audiologists, psychiatrists, developmental
optometrists, occupational therapists, pediatricians, neurologists, and speech-language
pathologists.
Participants will walk away with an understanding of what constitutes a comprehensive
neuropsychological evaluation, and of specific assessment measures used in private practice
and school based evaluations. Participants will also learn how developmental weaknesses,
learning disabilities, and giftedness can skew scores to further complicate the evaluation
