Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Thinking of skipping a grade?

I saw this in the RH margin and decided to post here for others to see after it is replaced with a more current story:-

Skipping - summary of research as it stands now

This is an excellent overview/summary.

Some of the research and authors mentioned in the article have been discussed in threads on the forums, including -

1. "A recent report from Johns Hopkins University shows that about two out of every seven children are ready for a higher-grade curriculum."
How can so many kids be invisible?
Wasting money teaching children what they know

2. "Our research – A Nation Empowered – shows many advantages to grade-skipping for talented students."
What research am I looking for

3. "Karen B. Rogers"
Acceleration advocacy advice needed

4. "David Lubinski and Camilla P. Benbow"
Just saw this on the weekly DYS distro

5. "Miraca Gross"
Article about poor school fit?

6. "Researchers have now developed a scale that can help a parent make such a decision for their child in kindergarten through eighth grade. The scale helps parents or teachers look at the main factors they need to consider when making such a decision. It also provides guidelines on how to weigh the relative importance of each of these factors."
This is the Iowa Acceleration Scale (IAS), now in its 3rd edition: IAS-3.
What research am I looking for

There is a roundup of acceleration threads here.

NOTE: The article linked in the OP ends with "This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article." That original article is found at this link, and it contains excellent links to its various source documents. Well worth a read!

If grade skipping were more common then the social disadvantages would be fewer. They say 2 in 7 could be advanced. Probably the same number could be held back. So 3 out of 7 are probably correctly placed. 4 kids in each 28 pupil class were accelerated it would become unremarkable.

puffin fully agree here. We made the decision not to take up the grade skip given the social concerns given that it was the only kid ever been considered for the option at our school. Which made no sense.

Well, if you look at a bell curve it should really just be a no brainer, right? The middle 40% or 50 %so, in the average +/- 10 IQ range, correctly placed with a "grade level" (ie average) curriculum. About 25% to 30%on each side of the curve, give or take a few, a year up or down from "grade level". (Sorry about the passive aggressive quotation marks, can't help myself). And a few percentage points on each side who could do with a curriculum 2 or more years further out, if not necessarily with the acceleration or demotion into a higher or lower age group.
You'd think it's a no brainer, but of course one could frame it into a scandal JUST being uncovered. Wait, they could write a book about it and call it, umm...a nation deceived or something? Like it might really get educators' and politicians' attention?

Maybe. I'm not sure. The IQ range for the 70th to 75th percentiles is 108 - 111. While I understand that IQ tests are flawed and there's more to academic ability than IQ, the reality is that these scores are solidly in the average range. The definition of a concept like acceleration is that it's something for people who are different. There is nothing wrong with average ability in a subject area, but it still isn't different. People of average ability don't make the varsity team in 8th or 9th grade (a sports equivalent of acceleration).

I've already written up some suspicions I have about the claims that millions of children would benefit from acceleration. While I never got around to answering the replies to what I wrote, I'm still suspicious. I also can't help but wonder if the need to skip ahead could be due more to slowing the pace and keeping content superficial to ensure that the lowest performers pass the high-stakes tests.

If we get overly inclusive and claim that 30% or more of students need acceleration, we create a situation that still completely fails to challenge gifted kids appropriately, because the accelerated/GATE/whatever classes will be serving kids who are above the average only in the purely pedantic sense that 108 > 100.

The obvious solution is to group each subject by ability and not lower standards in any of the groups. This might mean magnet-type schools for kids with IQs at least 2 SDs above the average that, themselves, would be ability-grouped by subject.

I suspect the outcomes reported in this study exaggerate the benefits of grade-skipping. Although the authors attempted to match the skipped and non-skipped cohorts, there is room for differences to be caused by unobserved variables. (This is mentioned in the "limitations" section.)

About 80% of the students included in the study had never had a grade skip prior to identification. We know that grade skips are almost always the result of advocacy (typically on the part of the parents). Thus the "grade-skip" group is stacked with children of parents who are inclined to perform such advocacy, while the "non-grade-skip" group isn't. I doubt that matching for parental education, career prestige, income, or any of the other parameters used would alleviate this discrepancy.

So how much of what they are measuring can be attributed to the skip itself, and how much of it can be attributed to having informed, involved parents who wont shy away from some advocacy?

In the case of self advocacy, how much of the measured differences can be contributed to personality? Are the same students who will self advocate for a skip the ones who will have more advanced degrees and more publications, even when matched for intellect? Probably.

That's my initial take on it, anyway. I went through it kind of quick, so let me know if there's good reason to disagree.

You raise excellent points.

What are your thoughts on this -
If more schools initiated utilization of the Iowa Acceleration Scale (IAS) as part of their policy/practice/process and therefore a grade-skip was not the result of strong parental advocacy... might the cohort of students who skipped one or more grades be more diverse... possibly leading to longitudinal study results which are more revealing?

On the other hand, those students for whom the IAS indicated a strong likelihood of success after a grade skip may be a good match for your described group of students with effective self-advocacy skills... those with a positive, resilient personality... a certain je ne sais quoi.

As you mentioned, rather than the grade skip being a cause of future success, the correlation of grade skip and future success may possibly be attributed to realizing that the endorsement to skip a grade may be responding to early detection of the same factors (skills and/or support) which later result in further success in advanced academics.

I concur.

But on the other hand over half of NJ were below grade level:-

link here