Hernán Castillo-Hermosilla
Speaker: Hernán Castillo-Hermosilla
Feldhusen Doctoral Student Fellow in Education. Marcia Gentry Influence Scholar & Fulbright Scholar. MENSA Foundation Gifted Education Fellow & Dean's Doctoral Fellow. Department of Educational Studies.. College of Education.
Link to Purdue Gifted Education Research Institute
Link to Speaker Profile
Mr. Castillo-Hermosilla will present a project explores novel gifted identification methods to find gifted people forgotten in the system by current instruments and how these other measurements may be relevant to use for additional pathways for identifying children who may be overlooked. This research project was given an award by the MENSA Researchn and Education Foundation (he presented it this year at the Foundation Meeting at the Mensa Annual Gathering in Kansas City) and he also received the Marcia Gentry Influence Scholarship.
Sponsored by Alison Brown
Program: Live and Zoom: Novel Gifted identification methods to find gifted people forgotten in the system
Speaker: Hernán Castillo-Hermosilla, doctoral student and researcher, Purdue Gifted Education Research Institute
Introduced By: Allison Brown
Attendance: NESC: 79; Zoom: 32
Guest(s): None
Scribe: John Peer
Editor: Bill Elliott
View a Zoom recording of this talk at: https://www.scientechclubvideos.org/zoom/03032025.mp4
Our presenter today was Hernán Castillo-Hermosilla, Feldhusen Doctoral Student Fellow in Education, College of Education, Purdue University, and a Fulbright Scholar. He was a gifted student in Chile and coached the 2019 Chilian National Team in the National Championship of Creativity sponsored by Taiwan. His team placed the best for any Latin America Team up to that time.
Unchallenging Classes + Current Identification Methods = Overlooked Giftedness. The theme of his research is to identify gifted talent that is not being identified by current standard testing, mainly IQ testing, that identifies only 2% of students as gifted. His hypothesis is that the pool is much larger, and their potential is not being developed because the current testing is too restrictive.
Some talented students are not recognized by current teaching methods. Several teachers find them as “problematic” more than “gifted or talented” due to behaviors and attitudes commonly associated with giftedness (keen questions, sarcasm, leadership skills, highly enthusiastic). They students tend to turn off seeing their effort as “not worth it”.
Hernán is developing a program entitled “Courage” (Criteria for Overcoming Underrepresentation by Redefining Access to Gifted Education) which uses programmatic steps based on six decades of an alternate scientific based testing to identify gifted talents. These techniques are used in isolated cases today, but are not widely used. They are applicable from ages 4+.
He is also developing a “Under Representation Index” to assess the effectiveness of alternate testing.
In the Q&A, the idea of universal screening by testing was mentioned. Taiwan uses this approach to direct students to their perceived strengths. Hernán thought this was a reasonable, but not sufficient step.
Another question was that the perception of the preparation of college level Honor’s program participants had declined from 2013 to 2024 and wondered if all the screen (computer) time was making it easier to achieve results without doing the actual work. Hernán thought the gifted talent pool had not changed, but the tolerance for frustration might have as the online services made it easy to get answers without putting in the work.
Thank you to Hernán for an interesting talk.
Hernán Castillo-Hermosilla
