Over 500 separate journal articles were reviewed to identify the 25 most frequently cited articles between 1972, the year the Marland Report was published, and 1988. To qualify for the data base the article must have used the term "gifted" or some related term (e.g., "giftedness," "genius," "precocious") in the title or have been indexed by ERIC or Psychological Abstracts with that term as a descriptor. The 25 most frequently cited articles were compared to a random sample of 25 articles from the same data set on a number of characteristics (e.g., purpose, theoretical basis, topical area, research design, and statistical methods). In general, comparisons on these and other variables showed few differences between frequently cited and randomly chosen articles. In comparison to other psychological/ educational disciplines gifted articles were cited much less frequently and used less sophisticated research designs and statistical analyses. Furthermore, articles tended to lack either a theoretical or research basis. Implications of these findings for the discipline are discussed.

The authors suggest that the recent focus on excellence in public education will lead to an increase in the evaluation of gifted programs. They maintain that evaluation of gifted programs should be formative, as opposed to summative, because gifted programming serves a valuable social need.The authors describe the process that evaluators go through to conduct a program evaluation, and then present their program evaluation model. Two approaches are integrated in their model. First, process-oriented evaluation defines essential program components and standards of acceptance. Second, outcome-oriented evaluation assesses components via student outcomes. Both approaches are described and suggestions are given for their use.

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A design, based on student performance, is presented that allows evaluators to judge the suitability of gifted curricula against two criteria: the curriculum should be unique from the regular classroom and it should be beyond the capability of the normal ability learner. To illustrate the design, a study is reported that evaluates two curricula units: higher level thinking (HLT) and independent learning (IL). Gallagher (1979Gallagher ( , 1981 lists curriculum evaluation as one of the major research agendas for gifted education. Further, he states that the appropriateness of gifted curricula must be assessed against the student outcomes the curriculum is presumed to promote. Unfortunately, few investigators have evaluated outcomes derived from the curriculum objectives (Carter and Hamilton, 1985). Instead, most