A brief narrative description of the journal article, document, or resource. This report explores the characteristics of giftedness in minority, language minority, and economically disadvantaged student populations and ways to assess giftedness in these populations. A qualitative content analysis is used to analyze gifted literature to determine characteristics of gifted children in general (n=262) and characteristics of gifted children from specific cultural groups (n=95), including African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. Ten core attributes of giftedness are identified: communication skills, imagination/creativity, humor, inquiry, insight, interests, memory, motivation, problem-solving, and reasoning. A general description accompanies each identified attribute. Implications are discussed for using these core attributes to facilitate educators' recognition of gifted abilities in student populations from minority or economically disadvantaged families and areas, and to guide educators in the selection of measures for identification of minority or economically disadvantaged families and areas. Recommendations for educators include the use of a variety of evaluation measures to assess giftedness and the use of standards to interpret performance on tests that accommodate the differences in the expression of gifted students from diverse backgrounds. An appendix includes a list of categories of giftedness and relevant checklist indicators for the different categories. (Contains 74 references.) (Author/CR)