About Danika, your gifted/2e parent coach

• I have a PhD in educational psychology - specifically school psychology - from The University of Texas at Austin.

​

• In my dissertation, I looked at whether gifted and twice-exceptional students rely on different intellectual capacities when they complete academic work - compared to average-ability students and to each other. It turns out they do! Processing speed has less influence on academic performance for gifted and twice-exceptional students.

​

• I have an MA in developmental psychology from San Francisco State University. I wrote my master’s thesis about the concept of a growth mindset and how students’ own mindsets may be shaped by the way their teachers talk and structure the classroom environment.

​

• I have a BA in communication and media studies from Macalester College, where I learned to take a critical approach to the world and question what’s considered “standard.”  This is also where I first learned about postmodernism and the subjectivity of reality - which led to an ongoing fascination with the importance of individual subjective lived experience.

​

• I’ve published sole-author original research on twice-exceptionality in Gifted Child Quarterly and I’ve collaborated with colleagues to write articles or chapters on cognitive abilities, giftedness, assessment, academic acheivement, and family-school relationships.

​

• I’ve won several awards for my research on giftedness and twice-exceptionality, including the Hollingworth Research Award from the National Associated for Gifted Children.

​

• I’ve presented at regional and national conferences, including the Annual Convention for the National Association for Gifted Children and Annual Convention of the the National Association for School Psychologists.

​

• During my graduate training, I was trained in CBT, exposure therapy for anxiety, family systems therapy, interpersonal therapy, psychodyamic therapy, and solution-focused therapy. Although I don’t provide therapy through the Gifted Learning Lab, my brain naturally thinks in terms of family systems, school systems, and interpersonal processes - which is why I love to help parents make small changes that lead to cascading positive effects and connections for their kids and for the whole family.

​

• I’ve been fascinated by twice-exceptionality since I learned about the term in my graduate class, Educational Disabilities in the Schools. I’m particularly interested in and knowledgeable about commonly-missed indicators of twice-exceptionality, missed identification of twice-exceptionality in psychological assessments, late identification of twice-exceptionality, “high-masking” or less obvious presentations of twice-exceptionality, and the subjective experience of being twice-exceptional.

​

• Despite specializing in unidentified twice-exceptionality since about 2014, it never occured to me that I could be twice-exceptional until I recognized my own traits and preferences in some of the vignettes in Dr. Devon Price’s excellent book, Unmasking Autism. After a very gifted/autistic deep dive into everything related to less-obvious presentations of autism, I began to self-identify as autistic and got a formal diagnosis in 2024.

​

• I was identified profoundly gifted at age 7, and skipped most of second grade. I was a high-achieving, people-pleasing, rule-following kid with a ton of anxiety who was often called a “perfectionist” (though I hated that term because I could tell it was a “bad” thing to be).