• Journal of Gifted/Talented Education
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.87-115
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• 2012

This study is about the development of an identification model for artistically gifted students from low income and/or multi-cultural families. Given that parental support at early ages is crucial for talent development, students from low income families are often dismissed in recognizing their artistic giftedness. Based on a comprehensive literature review and consultations with experts in art, the SMC model was developed to identify disadvantaged gifted students in the areas of music, visual arts, and ballet. The model consists of three steps of identification, such as review of documents and teacher recommendations, evaluations of artistic giftedness, and a summative evaluation, and involves multiple criteria for identifying giftedness in both domain general and domain specific arts. SMC is promising in discovering many unrecognized disadvantaged children of artistic potential, thereby using various quantitative and qualitative measures. Yet, issues of validity and reliability of SMC need to be substantiated by subsequent theoretical and empirical studies.