Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment IOWA Acceleration Scale

Love that story, Dottie! Sometimes kids know.

Cool Dottie! Plus they often tell teachers and other adults what they want, as opposed to what they might tell their parents - what they think we want to hear, etc...

And well, I was just told that they are not going to mention the whole grade acceleration right now to DS (see the Kindergarten thread in the Elementary School forum), so by the time he's done with the testing and sees what kind of work he COULD be doing then his own input will be easily swayed towards doing challenging things than just sitting there.

And I was kind of sad he didn't have any of his pre-K friends in his K class this year, but now, NO WAY. If he had them in his class now, he'd be less likely to want to change.

We asked for the IOWA at my son's IEP to help see if he would be a good candidate for acceleration and they practically oozed loathe for the fact that we homeschooled last year and they stated that the county doesn't use the IOWA and that it is only something homeschool families like to use :-( I tried to explain differently but cut me off stating they don't use it....so oh well

Were they confusing the IOWA Test of Basic Skills achievement test with the IOWA Acceleration scale? Why would HSers like to use the IOWA Acceleration scale?

We officially used the IAS for both my son and my daughter.

The school purchased and administered the questionnaire in a group setting. It isn't something that is administered TO your child. We all sat in a conference room and did it together. We = my children's current grade teacher, the principle, the director of curriculum for the district, the district asst. superintendent, the social worker, the gifted teacher, and the district psychologist (who had given my children the WISC IV and a few other tests).

We went through the entire questionnaire for a period of two hours. It asks everything from how the child behaves to how he scores to even how tall he is or if he is involved in extra curricular activities. Note that being shorter than average, having a sibling in the grade you wish to skip to, or not being involved in extra curricular activities all negatively impact your overall score.

In the end you get a score which tells them if you are an excellent, good, fair, poor candidate for whole grade acceleration or just subject grade acceleration.

The questions can be interpreted differently by different people so having a group discussion was helpful. Some choices are not clear cut.

In the end both my children were accelerated.

The IAS was used for the very first time in my district (!) on my children because they wanted a benchmark by which to judge any future requests for acceleration. I was actually encouraged to see them engage in relatively objective analysis as opposed to shooting from the hip on these sorts of things.