HOPE Teacher Rating Scale

The HOPE Teacher Rating Scale is designed to help guide teachers in identifying gifted students for programming. It is unique in several ways. First, it is short, with only 11 items that measure academic and social/affective components of giftedness, making it easy to use. Second, it is invariant when used to identify students from low-income and culturally diverse families. Third, it can be used across grade levels, K-12. Finally, local norms ensure that the data are relevant to the specific school populations. With multiple measures and multiple pathways crucial for reversing the inequities in identifying culturally, economically, and linguistically diverse students, a teacher-nomination instrument like the HOPE Teacher Rating Scale is an important component of identification systems. The HOPE Teacher Rating Scale items have been well-developed and subjected to research using more than 12,000 diverse students in five validity studies to date. This manual is useful in understanding and interpreting the electronic scores generated from teachers' ratings of their students. This instrument is a must-have for any administrator or gifted-program coordinator involved in student identification.