A couple of years ago, there was an academic article that examined the impact of gifted education curriculum for students on the margin of being accepted/denied to the program on subsequent test scores.

The main takeaway was that "learning with stronger peers did not yield a test score boost"

This was discussed in prior threads here
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....rning_With_Stronger_Peer.html#Post177330

and http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....h/true/An_article_in_WSJ.html#Post104833


I wanted to add some evidence to the discussion with another paper that provides a slightly different set of conclusions that has not been discussed in this forum as far as I can tell.

The paper was published in a prestigious economics journal in 2007 and is available here:
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article...rs-Affect-Student-Achievement-in-China-s


The gist is that they being with better peers (with no changes in curriculum) led to better results. The benefit of their study is that they are able to use quixotic rules governing how students are assigned in China to provide quasi-experimental evidence of the effects. The caveat is that these results are based on students in China, and may obviously not apply to the US.

Anyhow just thought to share...