Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy IOWA accelloration testing?

Has anyone had this? I think our public school does something like this but we are in private. Where do you have this done? Was it a good experience? Did it validate needs?

The Iowa Acceleration is really a review of whether or not acceleration is a good option for your child. It is not a test. There is a book that you purchase and then forms where you tally all the information. You must have testing already done for your child in order to use the form. One section of the testing takes into account IQ scores, achievement scores, it looks at social concerns, other siblings, size of child, sports, outside interests, emotional, behavior. I believe there were 6 categories. Based on the information it gives a score of excellent, good marginal or not recommended for grade acceleration. It is filled out in conjuntion with parents, school and test scores.

I don't think it would convince the school if they weren't somewhat on board already, but it did help us look at the big picture more. Fortunately for us the school did let us go ahead with the acceleration. The school kept my manual so maybe they plan on having it for future recommendations.

Last year, I took the school pschologist questionaires: Conner's rating scales and assessment of adaptive skills (Vineland Interview) They felt a bit uncomfortable because it was like telling the school some bad things. I was not sure what they would do with that info.

One good thing was the psychologist said his AHDA type behavior was probally due to lack of challenge. Yet they act like they are meeting and understand his needs now when he is underchallenged.

I wonder could my husband and I fill out the IOWA acceleration question so we could better understand his needs without the school involved? Would this be a good idea?

My husband and I did go to through the Iowa manual without the school first. We wanted to make sure we were going to be arguing for something that actually was in his best interest. But we didn't have any intention of telling the school that we'd already done it.

We borrowed the manual from interlibrary loan and it took about 4 weeks. I have since bought one on Amazon.

was it very informative for you? In what ways? Hope I'm not being too personal.

could you give me the title? It seem like I need to look into this.

Here's a link: Iowa Acceleration Scale Manual, 3rd edition

For info about it: http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Resources/IAS.aspx

I wouldn't say it was informative, we already strongly believed he'd be a good candidate for acceleration. It did bring up some points that we thought the school would see differently and provided us a tool for discussing those. There are some things- like the section that talks about motivation- that actually gave him more "points" than I would have thought. He's not an eager child who begs for more work. But he happily does whatever is presented and that scored him one less than the max points. I was pleasantly surprised to see this.

It turned out to be unnecessary for us. We had scheduled a big meeting with the teacher, the principal, the district psychologist etc. In the meeting, his teacher actually (unknown in advance to us) began advocating heavily for a mid-year skip. We sat there a bit dumbfounded, with a large pile of research unused, and listened to everyone agree with her. We just kind of smiled, nodded and started trying to hammer out the details of the when and who.