Abstract:

The identification of gifted and talented students remains a global challenge due to a lack of international consensus on definitions and the subjectivity of traditional classification methods. In Lithuania, where an estimated 9,900 students (3% of the school population) qualify as gifted, the absence of a formal registration system and the high cost of professional diagnostic tools often lead to these students being overlooked.

This paper addresses these gaps by proposing a robust Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) framework for gifted and talented student identification. By integrating the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a hierarchical model was developed that categorizes giftedness indicators into qualitative and quantitative criteria. Expert judgments were collected via specialized questionnaires and processed through pair-wise comparison matrices to determine the relative weight and rank of each criterion. Furthermore, the study explores the application of statistical methods to enhance the consistency of expert judgments. The results offer a scalable, cost-effective methodology for educational stakeholders to systematically identify and support gifted talent, moving beyond innate assumptions toward a developmental and multi-dimensional identification process.

Keywords:

Giftedness Identification, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM), Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Educational Policy, Lithuania.