Looking ahead in the field of gifted education: an interview with Carolyn M. Callahan.

Carolyn Callahan is a professor and department chair at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, and is currently the Director of the University of Virginia site of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. 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, issues facing gifted females, and gifted program options. 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.

Moon: What led you to the field of gifted education?

Callahan: I was aware of the field, which I guess many people are not, because I worked as an undergraduate work-study student for Joe Renzulli. I started out conducting analyses of a math test that he was working on with my undergraduate adviser and during this time, obviously, was exposed to the general field of gifted education. Not that I had any real sense of what it was all about. Then in my first teaching job I was assigned Senior Honors Math that was for all of the kids who had already finished the Calculus course. At that point in time I thought it was a great honor but it really wasn't, because there was no curriculum. So I immediately went back to the University of Connecticut to try to figure out what was going on and what the field of gifted education was all about. Since I knew Joe [Renzulli], I would be able to hook up with an expert. That was fortunate experience. I then decided I would get my Master's degree in gifted education. I started out my Master's degree in general education/psychology with an emphasis in measurement but took courses in gifted education and then went on to get a doctorate.

Moon: What were the most important lessons that you learned from Joe [Renzulli]?

Callahan: I guess there were a couple of important lessons. I think the most important lesson I learned from him in terms of the field of gifted education was that it's an ever-changing, ever-evolving field; that if we're going to make it work in any way, we have to be open to new ideas and new ways of thinking. Probably the second most important lesson that I learned was if you're going to be in the field of gifted education, you have to be independent and you can't rely on somebody else to do things for you. You have to make your own opportunities. Perseverance is critically important in making your way in this field. You have to make as many connections as possible with other people in the field so that you have opportunities to know what is going on and to be involved.

Moon: If you had to name individuals both in the field and maybe even outside the field who have had the greatest effect on your thinking, who would they be?

Callahan: Well, obviously, Joe Renzulli would be one. I would say Robert [Bob] Sternberg has probably had a very large impact in my way of thinking. And, probably also James [Jim] Gallagher would be a third individual. Bob in the field of psychology but also the field of gifted and Jim and Joe in the field of gifted education and Jim in the field of the politics of education. Outside the field I would say Michael Scriven and Michael Patton in the field of evaluation have probably had the most impact on another area of my concerns, which is evaluating programs for gifted students.

Moon: What other areas have held your interest over the years and how have they evolved?

Callahan: I started out doing my dissertation in the field of creativity. That's certainly remained an area of interest both in my research and in my teaching. The second area of interest has been gifted females. I did early reading, early writing, and presenting in that area. I then conducted some research on gifted females and continue to be very concerned about gifted females and their opportunities or lack thereof. The third area would be program evaluation. One other area that I've done some research and thinking about is identification of gifted students.

Moon: Are there parts of those areas of interest that you just mentioned that are radically different in terms of your thinking about them now versus 15 years ago?

Callahan: I would say the field of gifted females has changed radically from the issue of "opportunity and access" to one of being concerned about "success and being able to maintain a sense of self within opportunities and access." Gifted females now have more opportunity and a lot more access. I don't think we've reached equity by any stretch of the imagination, but that presents a whole new set of issues for women and I think the new issues are adjustment, self-concept, balancing--once you are successful, what are the issues that arise? I think there's been a slight change--a shift in what maybe some of the concerns are, although I would probably say there's still bias and there's still prejudice and probably still barriers. Most of the obvious external barriers have been removed but the internal ways in which society forms expectations and the messages, subtle and sometimes not so subtle, which are given to young women probably still inhibit them from making some of the choices that they would otherwise make. MTV is one example of a very subtle continual message about inferiority and probably still influences society and expectations.

I think the area of identification of gifted students has changed radically in 30 years from being almost entirely test dependent or entirely dependent on teacher evaluation to people being more concerned about profiles and portfolios and looking at student data as evolving rather than just a one time, one snapshot picture. We've got lots of work still left to do in this area.

Moon: What is some of the research that you're working on currently?

Callahan: One area is Advanced Placement. We're looking at secondary programs for gifted students and the effects of Advanced Placement on gifted students and different subpopulations of gifted students. I continue to work in the area of performance evaluation--how it impacts what we do and how we evaluate the outcomes of different programs.

Moon: If you had to give someone advice on the things not to do in their research, what might some of that advice be?

Callahan: Not to focus on the trivial, unimportant issues. I think it's really easy to narrow down research to the point where you're not asking questions that anybody cares about the answers to. I think the second thing that's wrong with our field in general and probably some of the research that I've done, is that we've focused far too much on descriptive research and not nearly enough on the things that really impact gifted students--whether it's curriculum or counseling or particular types of interventions. I think my advice would be that we really need to find ways to get funding and support--if I were a young researcher I'd be looking for ways to study effects of interventions on educational performance.

Moon: What do you see as some of the most important questions that those type of studies could address?

Callahan: I think they are probably comparative questions. If you look at this curriculum model or that curriculum model or this instructional strategy or that instructional strategy, what are the ways in which those altered the thinking and development of gifted students? The same would be true in the counseling area or the social emotional development area. Those are the most important questions--how do various interventions or educational programs compare with one and another? Which program or intervention has the greatest effect on teachers, students? I think we've tried always to answer the questions about the programming arrangement instead of the curriculum interventions. I also am beginning to wonder after discussions with Robert Pianta here at the University of Virginia about some of his research whether we've been barking up the wrong tree with curriculum since most recent research is beginning to see that it doesn't matter what curriculum teachers use, it's how they implement the curriculum. So, maybe we need to get much more sophisticated in our questions and look at curriculum interacting with instructional practice or teacher preparation or whatever those variables might be. I think we've over-simplified all of our questions. We either look at programming strategy--pull-out programs or self-contained classrooms--without looking at curriculum or we look at curriculum without looking at the instruction practice or the program delivery model in which it's offered. So I think we have to start to create more sophisticated models and more sophisticated questions.

Moon: Is there any research being conducted on any of those areas that you're just mentioned in the field of gifted education?

Callahan: I think some of the research we've done at the NRC/GT [National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented] here at the University of Virginia has tried to get at some of the curricular issues--the instructional issues and the curricular issues. I think Bob Sternberg's research has tried to get at the interaction between the models of intelligence, the ways in which kids are identified, and the curriculum that's implemented. So I think that people have started to look at parts of those pictures and are beginning to expand the research base for those areas.

Moon: What's happened as far as research in the field of gifted education that you think should receive more attention than it has?

Callahan: I would say work like Sternberg's, work like ours [University of Virginia-NRC/GT], work that has tried to look at curricular issues really hasn't gotten enough attention. It hasn't been well enough understood and as a result hasn't been distributed widely enough, although it has great potential to contribute to the field's thinking in the areas.

Moon: What are some areas within the field that you think may have been misinterpreted as far as the research goes?

Callahan: I don't know if I would say research, but I think one of the things that I find most disturbing is the way in which our field interprets the psychological research, the way our field attributes the theories that come from psychologists. I'll use Howard Gardener as the prime example. I think Gardener made an amazing contribution to our thinking about intelligence and our field [gifted] interpreted it in ways it was never intended to be interpreted. We took it and acted as if you could identify kids according to the various intelligences, that you could interpret curriculum or develop curriculum according to those intelligences. This wasn't what his intention was or what his theory or research said at all. Benjamin Bloom's work in assessment has been misinterpreted and misapplied the same way. He developed a way of categorizing test questions and all of the sudden we're creating curriculum around it. This was never the intention of that kind of work. So I think it's not so much that our research gets misinterpreted as much as we take research from other fields, don't fully understand it, and translate it into practice without an adequate basis for making translations.

Tonya R. Moon, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and a principal investigator for the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. Her specialization is in the areas of educational measurement, research, and evaluation and she works with state departments across the country on technical issues associated with educational assessments designed for accountability purposes. She also works as a consultant with school districts and schools on using better assessment techniques for improving instruction and student learning. She has published numerous articles, book chapters, and research monographs in the areas of student achievement, generalizability of performance scores, technical issues associated with performance assessments, and gifted education. E-mail: [e-mail].