ABSTRACT
Poor and minority students are underrepresented in programs that serve academically advanced and talented students. Because of this, program administrators have searched for alternative procedures for identifying academic talent that would increase the ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity of children in their programs. This chapter addresses both the claims made by advocates of nonverbal tests and the cautions and counterarguments offered by their critics. For many years, the late Richard Snow tried to convince educational researchers of the importance of the concept of aptitude. He defined the concept of aptitude much more broadly than most people would define it. Aptitude cannot be understood apart from either the kind of learning that must occur or the instructional contexts in which it must take place.
