Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Grade skipping outcomes

My oldest, D11, moved to a gifted program for fifth grade. He is now in 6th. One of the things he has enjoyed was moving from always being the youngest in the classroom to being smack bang in the middle of the age group - at least half of the class is accelerated as well.

While it remains anecdotal evidence, it is still quite a nice sample of how kids are doing a few years after acceleration. I thought I’d share a bit, since the subject comes up so frequently.

First off, I notice that outwardly at least, girls seem to be doing better than boys. Though the sample of girls is small and I know less about them than the boys, nor do I interact much with their parents, having a boy myself. They may struggle inwardly and not let it show. I know this is how it happens with my accelerated daughter,

The younger boys tend to struggle somewhat both sociallyand academically, and more so the younger they are. Fall or winter birthday, just a bit younger than the youngest non-accelerated kids? Tends to work better. Spring or summer birthday, a whole year younger? The struggle is very clear. Sounds like a no brainer once you write it down, but I rarely see th relative age distance referenced as a criterion.

My daughter (young for grade, born just before the cutoff) provides another daeta point: she happened to skip grades together with a girl that was almost exactly a year older, due to having been redshirted In the first place. They both had been first graders in a split classroom, went on to be third grades in almost the exact same classroom with the same kids. Up till then, they had identical educational experiences, with the identical teacher and identical kids. Older girl integrated seemlessly, it’s truly btu a grade correction for her. My daughter struggles socially (fairly invisible, she is not bullied or rejected, just lonely, and feels she is really friends only with her fellow skipper.

Early acceleration (early entry or skip in the early grades) appears to work much better than later acceleration. A few kids have skipped 4th grade (the “transition year” that the IAS counsels against), and boy, does it hold true - those kids, no matter how smart they are, really struggle with with writing and languages.

Neither of my kid struggle academically, by the way, with the exception of some EF issuesm they soared effortlessly to the top of the class wherever they are. Particularly in my daughters case (she is also tiny, whereas my older son is physically indistinguishable from the non accelerated kids), all of which makes the academic/social mismatch in development that much more glaring and continues to convince me that grade skips provide bandaids, but don’t work very well as the only or best solution.

Thoughts? Of those who have more than just one or two data points, dos your experience tally with mine?

My experience has been identical with gender. I am probably the opposite of most parents here, I worried more about the social impact and (stupidly) believed the school would adjust for academics. My DS9 is a late summer birthday, so we had him be the oldest in his grade. The school kept bugging us to move him up a grade (essentially because they could not/would not differentiate). We agreed to subject accelerate him only. Each upper grade teacher would say how great he did in their classes, and continued to recommend moving him up entirely. Then the next year, when they actually had him in their real class, they recanted and stated that socially he thrived being the oldest in their class (so it was helpful having them see him in both groups). DD7 did an early admit for kindergarten, with the intention of us using it as babysitting for us, and the school getting extra funding for her (very small school and it had a low kindergarten enrollment rate that year), and we were told and agreed that she would do kindergarten again the next year with her same age peers (spring birthday). She thrived, and the school changed their minds and pushed us to continue her with that grade. We did not want her being 16 most of her senior year in HS, and refused. She redid kindergarten in a different, much larger school, and is now at the end of her first grade year. She has never bounced back and does not thrive at all. She will state that she is at such a different level than her peers, and has asked repeatedly to be grade skipped again. However her new school will not do grade skips at all. So grade skipping was a better choice for our daughter, but not our son (they are both equally ahead, not much intelligence differences between the two).

My elementary school called a parent meeting on two separate occasions to recommend a full-year acceleration for me, but my parents declined on social grounds. In hindsight, it's difficult to fault their reasoning.

For DD13, we found that none of the social concerns that applied to me applied to her, so we skipped her without reservations, and to be perfectly honest, a second one would probably have worked out even better.

I skipped 4th, and my parents turned down a skip from 3rd to 6th on social grounds. Their choice provided insufficient acceleration, but it meant no academic disruption in terms of class rank. I later cut out the last year of high school and received university credits in high school for first year. By university, I was 3 years younger than my peers, but it felt like there was no gap in any area. (I suspect male accelerants might have a harder time with the social side here.)

DS6 hasn't skipped per se, but has telescoped 1/2 this year in a mixed-age classroom. A grade 3 placement next year will still be below his functional level in most subjects, so I'm looking to place him in a mixed-age classroom the following year that covers grades 4-6, in case he needs further acceleration, and provide some acceleration on the side in math/science in the interim.

For DS, I'm very conscious about ensuring that his output in the core subjects is >=90%ile for end of year benchmarks, as well as ensuring he is housed in a phys-ed class with similarly sized students. Because he's very large for age, I have less concerns in terms of impacts on athletics/leadership/social.

Several of my family members have skipped one or more grades, from small-for-age males with early spring birthdays to late fall females of average size, all maintaining their academic standing. The females seem able to adjust to later grade skips, with several (including myself) concentrating their acceleration in their teen years. The males have only skipped in K/1/2.

My view is that you really have to consider the individual learner at the point of each skip, as the child's academic/social/emotional needs will vary over time.

DS7 started K early so he is accelerated one year. He’s the youngest second grader at a large public elementary and is doing great. He doesn’t have social or behavioral issues and just qualified for the gifted program for next year.

It would be a poor fit if he were in first grade this year. He’s at the top of his class in second grade. He’d be really bored in first. For him being the youngest is no issue at all.

I probably know at least a dozen individuals who were grade-skipped, early entered, or radically accelerated, not including those who've been homeschooled for most of their education. What I know of their outcomes (and much of the research) align with many of the observations made by PPs. Factors that tend to lend to success:

-female
-taller/more physically mature
-early entry, or otherwise skipping at natural school transitions (e.g., into the first year of middle school, high school, or college; when changing schools)
-balance between instructional and executive function challenge (e.g., the greater the EF demands, the higher the student's achievement level needs to be in comparison to the placement; when instruction is more closely matched to the true ZPD, then EF often needs to be scaffolded).

The vast majority of the persons in the sample referenced above appear to have had net-positive experiences with grade-skipping or its variants, but there were generally trade-offs of varying degree. How one weights the trade-offs is highly individual.

Simplified version of my personal experience (which is actually much more complicated than this): early entered to K, skipped third, ninth, twelfth. Entered uni with a few credits from summer classes from the one summer between high school years, four years younger. But I entered university with a number of close relatives, ahead of me, close behind me, and in my cohort, and access to several proactively supportive communities on campus, which is highly likely to have contributed to my social transition.

My family and friend network includes both males and females with early and late skips. At least a couple of males declined an offered skip, or even reversed a skip, partly for social-emotional maturity reasons, with the declined (late) skip looking like the right decision in retrospect, and the (late) reversed skip not. My PG sib, who didn't skip at all early, made up for it with a multiple-grade late-grade skip split across two years. In the case of learners who need that magnitude of skip, I think the question of whether males/females, taller/shorter, etc. handle the skip better socially becomes much less significant than how urgently the individual requires acceleration for academic reasons (as well as to moderate all of the social-emotional sequelae of catastrophically-poor educational fit).

My son was homeschooled for K-4, skipped 5th, did 6th at a tiny private school where his class was combined with the 7th graders (with additional acceleration in math), skipped 7th (because he had done it the previous year in the combined classes), and did 8th at the private school. While the EF demands ratcheted up in each skip, the intellectual demands stayed fairly constant. So, school was challenging, but not in the right way and by the end of that year, he was begging to be homeschooled again.

So we did high school level work at home for two years and then he decided to go to the public high school as a 9th grader. He has been there for the past two years, and to the school's credit, they placed him properly in math. But the other classes, particularly English and social studies, have been a joke. So midyear this year (10th), we decided to homeschool him in those two subjects again. Next year, he will take three AP classes at the high school and three college level classes at home. And we are thinking about either graduating him at the end of next year with a gap year or doing a very non-traditional senior year.

The skips were an interesting exercise. I'm sure they work for some kids, but in our case it seemed like we just ended up trading one set of problems for another, and the main problem, the lack of intellectual stimulation, was never solved.

My DS11 skipped a few years ago, and is now in 7th grade. He is positively thriving, and there has literally not been one negative thing about it. In the least, one skip wasn't enough.

He is not a social butterfly at all, but he has made friends who have similar interests. He finds them immature, though, but tolerable. The fact that there are nearly two years older has helped.

He also has very strong EF skills.

I do wish that DS did early entry, so that way he could have fit in another grade skip.

Similar experience here. My son skipped 5th grade, and subject accelerated into 7th grade science, 8th grade math. He has EF issues. He does better socially in middle school than with age mates.

He is bored in all his classes except science (Which is more rigorous than the biology class I took in high school). The EF demand is challenging him, but intellectually he is bored. He has made progress on some EF, organization and study skills. But as soon as he adjusted and realized the material was easy, he backed off on those and isn't developing more ability in that area.

DS10 started K early but we ended up undoing the one year acceleration and spending three years in a K/1 classroom. He is my 2E son and around K/1 he was doing a lot of OT and remediation. He really liked his K/1 teachers. He was also in a small Montessori school at the time and grades didn’t matter much. He could always do higher level work.

When we switched to public school we put him in an all gifted classroom in the correct grade for his age. It has been a good fit.

So for him I’d say undoing the skip was a good thing.