Parallel Session Proceedings »
File 1 1.8MB |
2.1.5 Using Measures of Implicit Conceptions in Gifted Education Research
Implicit measures are used in psychological research to measure attitudes, stereotypes, evaluations that are automatically activated and are not necessarily consciously recognized by the participant. This type of measure is in contrast with explicit measures such as surveys, observations, and interviews. Implicit measures can be modified to measure ingrained attitudes about giftedness, talent, diversity and other issues that are difficult to assess due to response bias. This presentation describes several implicit measures and how they may be used in research in the field of gifted education.
There has been an increased interest in the use of instruments that measure the automatic associations that the mind makes when confronted with a concept or type of person. These implicit measures assess attitudes and stereotypes that might not be revealed during traditionally designed assessments. Implicit measures are of interest for researchers because of the hypothesis that these implicit attitudes influence teacher nomination practices. This presentation will describe several instruments/programs and how they can be adapted for use in research in the field of gifted education. Information about reliability and validity issues will be included.
The measures will include:
• The IAT (Implicit Association Test) and subtypes use reaction time to measure automatic associations between dichotomized concepts (e.g., fat/thin, athletic/clumsy) and evaluations (e.g., good/bad).
• Mutability-based assessment measures the relative importance of different features that make up beliefs about a construct.
• Causal feature mapping assesses the relationships among the features that make up beliefs about a construct.
• Draw a Person Test is a projective measure that evaluates stereotypes through asking the participant to draw a detailed picture of a certain category of person. For example, "Draw a Scientist" is used to measure implicit beliefs about gender and science.