Gifted students can produce truly quality work when the classroom standards are written and aligned properly.
When asking a gifted student to demonstrate a skill, we can observe, record, and assess the content piece. The teacher will then place the materials demonstrating the students' mastery of the individual benchmarks in that student's portfolio for further assessment. Once again, the use of rubrics for evaluating and reporting on performance assessment devices is pivotal to the success of the program. This is another issue altogether - that rubrics and benchmarks can be used effectively on report cards that reflect if the students are obtaining the standards.
It is at the benchmark level where schools can make connections with nationally established standards, such as the learning goals that are found in Project 2061's Benchmarks for Science Literacy. By following this approach schools can assure each gifted student's progress towards exit-level standards by providing observable and measurable outcomes that fit within the curriculum and are substantiated by national standards! Any number of assessment devices can be used to substantiate a student's progress towards exit-level standards including the use of portfolios, rubrics, self-evaluations, traditional testing materials, teacher/student conferences, computer technologies, running records, literature logs, peer conferences, journals, logs, and a number of other similar tools.
Because each student needs to move towards these standards, individualized performance standards and performance targets can be established by GATE and regular classroom teachers, parents, counselors, and administrators for each student according to his or her developmental level by using a different combination of benchmarks as exemplars. When the school has done a quality job of producing assessment and content standards that are valid, reliable, measurable, and observable; and when these standards have been explained well enough to all staff members, all of the community members will have a responsibility to assess the gifted students against the standard of "personal best."
