Data Science for Social Good: GATEways to Gifted and Talented Education for All
Millions of students are missing from Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) classrooms across the United States. What types of students are missing? How does this compare across individual states, counties, and districts, and what can be done at all municipal levels to combat these issues? Director of 
the Scholar Identity Institute and Vanderbilt Associate Professor of African-American and Diaspora Studies, Dr. Gilman Whiting seeks to illuminate and remedy inequity in enrollment in GATE programs across the nation. Notably, his research has identified that black students and students of color are particularly underrepresented in Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) programs, and overrepresented in the 3.5 million students that are missing from these programs nationwide.
In this collaboration with the Data Science Institute and Data Science for Social Good program participants, intuitive data-driven tools for exploring missingness will be developed to enable educators and policymakers to estimate the number of students denied access in their area, and compare their performance to other local districts, counties, and states. This development will provide visual insights into inequity to be addressed and areas and mechanisms for improvement. This project involves the creation of interactive visualization dashboards, the building and training of predictive machine learning models, and the development of simulations to explore policy implications.