Change Font Size:   A A A

Mar 26, 2018

Episcopalians Receive Prestigious Award

(l-r) Christine Walther, Rob and Carol (Carmen) Bartsch won the prestigious
American Education Research Association’s (AERA) Michael Pyryt Collaboration Award.

Two members of St. Thomas the Apostle and a colleague from the University of Houston-Clear Lake have been named winners of the prestigious American Education Research Association’s (AERA) Michael Pyryt Collaboration Award, presented by its Special Interest Group for Research on Giftedness, Creativity and Talent for their joint research. Associate Professor of Educational Foundations Carol Carman, Assistant Professor of Psychology Christine Walther and Professor of Psychology Robert Bartsch will receive the award at the annual AERA meeting in New York City in April. The Bartsch’s are members of St. Thomas where their son, Thomas, also attends school.

The intent of the award is to promote scholarship in the area of giftedness, creativity and talent to the larger education research community through collaborations, and to benefit from the insights of important scholars who have not previously studied or written about gifted, talented or creative populations.

Bartsch and Walther joined with Carman, who has published in the gifted and talented field, to investigate “Using the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT) 7 Nonverbal Battery to Identify the Gifted/Talented: An Investigation of Demographic Effects and Norming Plans.” Their article featuring the results will appear in the April 2018 issue, volume 62, issue 2 of Gifted Child Quarterly, the flagship journal of the National Association for Gifted Children. It is also currently available in its OnlineFirst publication area.

One of the ongoing problems in gifted identification is the underrepresentation of students from various demographic groups such as racial/ethnic minority students and students from poverty.

“By exploring different ways of using one of the most commonly used identification tests with a sample of over 15,000 students, we discovered that the test cutoff itself may be responsible for some of the differences in group identification,” Carman said. “We proposed to use school-level identification, as that reduced the demographic differences between the identified students and the demographics of their district.”

(l-r) Christine Walther, Rob and Carol (Carmen) Bartsch won the prestigious American Education Research Association’s (AERA) Michael Pyryt Collaboration Award.