Early Career Mini-Grant

With a commitment to promoting equity in gifted and talented education, Lee engages in a variety of scholarly activities. She conducts research studies, delving into the unique needs, challenges, and experiences of advanced learners. Her work also involves developing educational resources, including curriculum materials and instructional strategies tailored to the specific requirements of gifted students.

Lee provides professional development opportunities for educators and administrators, empowering them with the knowledge and skills needed to effectively nurture and support advanced learners. By engaging in advocacy efforts and collaborating with stakeholders, Lee works to implement policies that ensure equitable access to gifted and talented education. Through her work, Lee strives to break down barriers and create a level playing field where all students can thrive and excel academically.

While teaching, she implemented a Maker Space in her school system, started the county’s Destination Imagination program, and served as the county coordinator. She has taught multiple summer enrichment programs in robotics and programming.

Dr. Roberts’ research interests include teacher perceptions of curiosity & creativity and women in STEM. Her research proposal aims to combat systemic racism and provide social justice development as gifted education in order to provide a systematic response that involves anti-racism and social justice efforts in reaction to recent current events. Her goal: further researching Black gifted and talented students’ needs to fill a knowledge gap.

“Black gifted and talented students’ needs have not been extensively studied, especially at the college level and at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) Honors Program,” she said. “This study will explore HBCU Black honors students’ self-perceptions of their curiosity and creativity. Knowledge of these self-perceptions can help students to become more self-aware of their strengths in these specific areas of curiosity and creativity. These self-perceptions can also help professors and honors program staff members to better support and address the needs of their Black honors students.”

Black, Hispanic, low-income, and twice-exceptional students might be underrepresented in gifted programs because they are missed during gifted identification procedures.

One prevalent but controversial gifted identification process is the use of teacher nomination. Although some studies suggest that teacher nominations are biased for black, Hispanic, low-income, and twice-exceptional students, the small sample sizes of teachers asked to make nominations and the lack of diversity in those teacher samples make it challenging to draw conclusions about the ways in which specific student and teacher characteristics impact nomination decisions.

Dr. Ridgley’s study will engage in a large-scale collaborative effort to explore teacher nominations and involve not only a larger sample of teachers but greater representation of students from diverse backgrounds. Within this collaboration, teachers will be recruited to read four randomly assigned teacher vignettes with student characteristics manipulated and make nomination decisions for gifted identification, grade skipping, grade retention, and behavioral intervention.

Teachers will also provide demographic information (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity) and information on their teaching background in general (e.g., years of experience) and in gifted education (e.g., professional development, certificate/endorsement).

Dr. Ridgley’s study will use multilevel path analysis to explore how student and teacher characteristics affect each of the four nomination options.