Recent reports suggest that up to 20 % of all school-aged students demonstrate characteristics related to emotional disturbance. However, \1 % of these students actually receive special education services for ED, a percentage that has remained unchanged for nearly 30 years. Screening procedures have been developed to identify the behavioral needs of students within school-wide systems such as Multitiered System of Support, Positive Behavior Support, and Response to Intervention. While several screening tools are available at this time, many require significant time, training, and/or effort, factors which limit their practical use in schools. A new efficient assessment tool Emotional and Behavioral Screener (EBS) has recently been developed as a universal screening instrument. The purpose of this study was to examine the validity of the EBS scores, with a sample of over 600 elementary students, in comparison to scores from the Social Skills Improvement System assessment tool. Results indicated high levels of convergent validity between the scores (social skills; q = -0.70; and problem behavior; q = 0.79); strong criterion validity as assessed by differences in EBS scores between individuals with normal versus problematic scores (based on established cut-off scores) on the SSIS (social skills; d = 2.23; and problem behavior; d = 3.58) and assessed by binary classification between cut-off scores of the EBS and SSIS (AUROC range .86-.88); and adequate social validity. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed.

Twice-exceptionality is the phenomenon of a student who presents both a disability and gifted/talented characteristics. One of the most challenging aspects of this phenomenon is how a disability can mask or hide gifted/talented characteristics; how gifted/talented characteristics might mask a disability; or how both might mask each other. Given the paradoxical nature of twice-exceptionality, it is understandable how twice-exceptional students can easily be overlooked in the demanding day-to-day reality of school, even if teachers have knowledge of twice-exceptionality. The purpose of this study was to examine if teachers, parents, and other professionals could identify twice-exceptionality given specific clues. For this pilot study, the author surveyed professionals in the field of gifted/talented to measure their ability to recognize twice-exceptional characteristics after reading fictional scenarios that represented possible real-life situations. All participants were members of the Colorado Association of Gifted and Talented (CAGT) in Colorado USA. A total of 107 respondents responded to an electronic survey with the highest response rate for any one question of 78. The results indicated that professionals failed to recognize twice-exceptionality because of how well the characteristics were masked. The findings indicated that more needs to be done to inform educators of the phenomenon of twice-exceptionality.