Time magazine this week discusses the challenges, benefits, and pitfalls of "grade skipping" - moving extremely gifted students up to a higher grade. Critics have long maintained that moving children, however brilliant, into classes with older students will hurt them socially if not academically. Citing statistics from A Nation Deceived, a study released this week, proponents are fighting back. According to authors Nicholas Colangelo and Susan Assouline of the University of Iowa, and Miraca Gross of the University of New South Wales, Australia, "accelerated students have performed almost as well on standardized tests as older classmates, even those with similar IQs" and "accelerants far outscore their equally gifted age-mates who did not move ahead." In addition, 63 percent of grade skippers were judged by their teachers to have adjusted "relatively well" or "very well" to school. Despite this evidence, scores of parents who have tried to accelerate their gifted students have run into resistance from teachers, administrators, and counselors. In fact, the authors report, they are not aware "of any other education practice that is so well researched, yet so rarely implemented." It seems that many are convinced merely by anecdotal evidence of kids who have been forced ahead, only to face problems they were not prepared to handle, rather than relying on research indicating that grade skipping is a plausible answer to the perplexing question of how to keep gifted kids engaged and challenged when so many other students are falling behind. As Assouline points out, "we have every reason to believe that when the decision is carefully made, the student will do fine."
"Saving the smart kids," by John Cloud, Time, September 27, 2004
A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students, by Nicholas Colangelo, Susan G. Assouline, Miraca U. M. Gross, The Connie Belin & Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, College of Education, The University of Iowa, September 2004