Putting Standards Into Practice: Evaluating the Utility of the NAGC Pre-K-Grade 12 Gifted Program Standards

Despite their importance, there has been surprisingly little scholarly examination of the NAGC Pre-K-Grade 12 Gifted Program Standards (NAGC, 2008/2000; Landrum, Callahan, & Shaklee, 2001) since their publication a decade ago. As part of a larger study investigating the effectiveness of local policies developed within the framework of state law, we used a qualitative approach to examine the 'minimum' and 'exemplary' criteria from the Student Identification portion of these NAGC Standards. Through this process we developed a 27-item checklist, which we then used to evaluate 43 locally developed plans for identifying diverse gifted learners from one large state in the southeastern United States. Based on this experience, we identify the strengths and weaknesses that we encountered in using the Standards for this purpose. We provide the checklist items we developed, and we offer specific suggestions for how the Gifted Program Standards in their currently ongoing revision process might be made more user-friendly for practitioners to apply toward effective evaluation of gifted program documents.