Program Evaluation in Gifted Education

Carolyn M. Callahan received her Ph.D. in the area of Educational Psychology with an emphasis in gifted educa-tion from the University of Connecticut. Since that time she has been on the faculty of the University of Virginia where she has developed the graduate program in gifted education, the Summer and Saturday Program for gifted students, and has been the director of the University of Virginia National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented for the past 12 years. She has done research across a broad range of topics in gifted education including the areas of the identification of gifted students, the evaluation of gifted programs, the development of performance assessments, and gifted program options. In collaboration with the other staff of the University of Virginia program, she has developed and delivered the highly successful annual Summer Institute on Academic Diversity for the past 5 years. Further, she was one of the editors of Aiming for Excellence: Gifted Program Standards, which is now widely used as the framework of criteria against which gifted programs are judged. As part of her work outside the university, Dr. Callahan has worked with over 300 public school districts across nearly every state in the development of program designs, curriculum, and evaluations. Finally, Dr. Callahan has received recognition as Outstanding Faculty Member in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Outstanding Professor of the Curry School of Education, Distinguished Higher Education Alumnae of the University of Connecticut, and was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Association for Gifted Children. She is a past president of The Association for the Gifted and the National Association for Gifted Children. She also sits on the editorial boards of Gifted Child Quarterly, Journal for the Education of the Gifted, and Roeper Review.