Gifted Rating Scales Second Edition Now Available!

MHS is proud and excited to announce the release of the Gifted Rating Scales™ Second Edition (GRS™ 2).

Originally published in 2003, the Gifted Rating Scales™ (GRS™; Pfeiffer & Jarosewich, 2003) were conceptualized at a time when Intelligence Quotient (IQ) was often being used as the sole determinant of whether a youth should gain access to gifted education services. Fundamentally, giftedness is a multidimensional construct; there are many ways in which giftedness can manifest, as a student can be gifted in virtually any dimension that is of value to our society. The GRS was specifically designed to reflect the multidimensional nature of giftedness and to give teachers the opportunity to provide a far more comprehensive picture of a student’s abilities and gifts across a wide range of domains.

Since its inception, the GRS has become one of the most widely used rating scales for identifying gifted students, recognized globally for its ease of use and outstanding psychometric properties. The GRS is one of the most well-researched gifted rating scales, with over 20 peer-reviewed studies to reiterate the validity of the tool across seven different languages.

In launching the GRS 2, our goal is to retain all the key strengths of the original but to offer significant improvements and updates that reflect current best practices for gifted student identification. We aim to ensure the GRS 2 can continue to serve as an integral part of a robust and comprehensive gifted assessment process.

Click here to purchase the GRS 2

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Why did MHS revise the GRS?

One of the first steps in addressing the needs of gifted students is for educators and psychologists to use valid assessment tools that can assist in identifying these students and determining which services they may benefit from. Today, many well-established tests are designed to tap into a student’s intellectual ability and academic achievement. However, there is a continued need for a tool that reflects a more comprehensive, multidimensional conceptualization of giftedness.

The GRS has become a highly instrumental part of a well-rounded gifted assessment because, in addition to providing insight into intellectual ability and academic ability, it also provides insight into a student’s creativity, artistic talent, and leadership abilities. Moreover, the GRS provided insight into the key contextual factor of motivation. Thus, the GRS plays a critical role in ensuring that students who excel, or have the potential to excel, are recognized for gifts and talents across a much wider range of domains and thereby receive differentiated instruction that best reflects their own unique profile of strengths and opportunities for growth.

In developing the GRS 2, MHS worked very closely with authors Steven Pfeiffer, Ph.D. and Tania Jarosewich, Ph.D.  to build key new features that would help to ensure the GRS 2 provides an even richer, more comprehensive, and more nuanced picture of a student’s abilities. This effort included the development of an all-new parent form. The GRS 2—Parent allows GRS 2 administrators to collect ratings of a student’s abilities from multiple perspectives, cultivating a stronger understanding of the student’s behavior across multiple settings and contexts. Additional key revisions include updated norms, an expanded age range, fewer items per scale, and more insightful reporting.

What’s new in GRS 2?

Updated Norms
The normative sample has been updated to cover a wide variety of students of different ages, gender, races/ethnicities, parental education levels, and geographic locations throughout the U.S. and Canada. The new normative data were derived from a large sample that was selected to be representative of the North American population based on the 2018 U.S. census.

An all-new Parent Form
A new Parent Form—available in English and Spanish—gives users additional data points for Cognitive Ability, Creative/Artistic Ability, and Resiliency & Social Competency in the assessment process for gifted identification. The Parent Form enables ratings based on behaviors observed in different contexts, allowing for a more holistic view of students’ abilities.

Expanded upper age range
Since its development, the GRS has been used hundreds of thousands of times to assess observable student behaviors indicating giftedness in students aged 4–13 years. Based on market feedback regarding the need to screen secondary school students, the age range was expanded to 4–18 years.

An enhanced administration experience
A new, modular design allows users to select which scales to administer. The GRS 2 scales can be used individually or in any combination. Moreover, the number of items per scale have been streamlined to make the scales more efficient to administer.

Enhanced insights
The Response Style Analysis section of the report can help determine whether a teacher or parent has rated items thoughtfully and carefully. A student’s relative strengths across the GRS 2 scales can be determined by comparing T-scores on the scales meant to assess giftedness with the student’s average score on the administered scales.

Eager to learn more? Get in touch with a member of our team today!