Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Woohoo, she passed!

DD7 took the proficiency exam for 2nd grade math, reading, and language arts today. She needed a 90 to get a subject acceleration in each area, and a 90 in both math and reading averaged with lang arts to be allowed to test for science and social studies (where a 90 on both would result in a full grade skip to 3rd).

I spent the afternoon worrying that she'd pass reading and language arts, but not math, which would have been a poor placement for her. (She asked to skip specifically to get harder math, but math is generally her weaker subject.) As it happened, she got a 92 on each.

Since she passed both, no matter what the result is in the minor-subject tests, she'll get a placement that's good for her. Her preference is for a placement in 2nd with subject acceleration for math, reading, and language arts. As parents, we prefer a full grade skip (which is what I think she's likely to get, in any case). Her hesitation is entirely social, and I think she'll do better socially in the long run (beyond the first 2 weeks of school) with the full skip.

I will say that the tests (as far as I can tell) are not what I expected at all. DD reports that she was allowed to use a calculator for most of the math test (and I did see her using a calculator), and that they asked absolutely nothing about several of the topics specifically mentioned in the standards (like the parts of a friendly letter). DD commented that she did well on the test because she went into it without any expectation of what it would be like, and described the testing as both easy and fun.

Our district has ~16,000 kids K-4 to 12th, so maybe 13,500 in the grades likely to test. They have two testing dates a year, of which this was one. There were 4 kids testing today, including DD. So testing for an acceleration / skip really is quite rare in our district.

YAY!!

How awesome for you and your daughter! Great news!!!

YAY! Congrats!

I am surprised they let a calculator be used for material at this age?! WOW! Crazy!

Woo hoo! Awesome!

Yeah, we really boggled over that for a while. As best as we can tell, the purpose of the calculator was to test understanding of concepts without careless errors as a confound. So she didn't get to use a calculator for the "choose the correct operation," portion, for instance.

She's still young enough to be an unreliable reporter ("Did they ask you about capitalization?" "No, they didn't ask anything about that. They gave me a bunch of sentences, and I had to pick the one that was right, and it was the one that started with a capital letter."), so it's not entirely clear to me what the nature of the calculator-allowed items was.

Hahaha! That's cute about the capilization thing!

I guess that makes sense about the reasoning for the calculator but at the same time, just a little surprising to me!

Well, the important thing is she passed and WOOHOO! That's worth celebrating

That does seem very likely to be true. I also think full skips call less attention to a kid than subjects acceleration - which can be a pro or a con depending on the kid. Of course some kids need both full and subject skips...

I wonder how the other 3 kids did. Gradeskips may be rare in your district, but they are much much less rare than our district (1/3 years!)

Yippee!

Due to some indiscretion on the part of my MIL, DD was aware that she'd be allowed to test for a potential skip during the last few days of her 1st grade year. And a 6yo has no discretion for exciting news, so all of her friends heard about it - and they reacted very negatively, saying that skipping was "cheating" and "not fair." I think that a subject acceleration that kept her with those same kids would be a worse social position than a skip that put her with entirely different kids. (Which is consistent with what I've heard anecdotally, that the left-behind kids are a much bigger problem than the higher-grade kids.)


For a similar district size? I wasn't surprised by the absolute numbers, so much as the infinitesimal portion of the student body. I got the impression last year that full-grade skips are quite rare (particularly as you go up in grades) but that subject acceleration in the older grades wasn't nearly as rare.

The other kids testing were two middle-school aged boys (who I believe were testing for individual subjects, not an entire grade), and a high-school aged girl who had "more tests than anyone else." I wonder if she was a homeschooler (or partial homeschooler) who was testing in order to get formal credit for the work she'd done - the testing isn't just to get a grade skip, but to get transcript credit for work not done through normal district-offered classes. For instance, if DD later did Algebra I as a summer program through Duke TIP, she'd have to test through the district both to get transcript credit towards graduation and to be allowed to enroll in Algebra II.

May I ask what state you live in? I know that Ohio has an acceleration policy.

Oh I love hearing success stories, Way to go girls!!!

We're in Oklahoma.

I really see the formal statewide policy as a double-edged sword. For a kid who can jump through the required hoops, the policy keeps an uncooperative local school from vetoing acceleration. But if you have a kid who doesn't test well for any reason, or who barely misses the cutoff, there's no provision for a cooperative local district to allow acceleration based on teacher recommendation, for instance.

Plus, the process isn't well-publicized. I went back through press releases, and our district announces only one of the two test dates each year, with that announcement made only on the school website, a week or two before the deadline. If you didn't already know about it, you'd never know about it.

DD's first grade teacher said there were several kids in the class she felt had the skills to go straight to third - but that she wasn't allowed to suggest that to their parents. (I think that's a fair assessment, too - they'd just done achievement testing, and DD did not get the highest scores in her class, although she was in the top group.) I really wish the district publicized the program and encouraged every kid with a GT identification or teacher recommendation to attempt it - if skips and accelerations were less unusual, I think it would be better for everyone's education.

I also wish there were a provision for mid-year skips / accelerations. While we have two test dates (late spring and late summer), the acceleration is effective at the start of the next school year only.

That's awesome! Congratulations!!

So glad this worked out for you and DD. It is always challenging to know how much to say and when. We have learned the hard way to keep info like this within the immediate family until the final decision has been made - and it is tricky with younger kids. We want to have honest communication with our DS, but we also want to make sure there is some restraint in terms of communication with other families. So hard to figure out some times.

Side point, how many of you have deferred to your children re: subject vs. grade acceleration, etc. My feeling is that ultimately it is a grown up decision, and that while I am interested in my DS's opinion, the weight of th decision is on the adults. But how does IAS handle this sort of thing??

Anyway, back to the important bit - congrats!! Cat

IAS version I have says "The student indicates that she does not want to be whole-grade accelerated" is an absolute contraindication to a full skip.

In May, when the misery of being in a not-hard-enough classroom was weighing heavy on her mind, she was wholeheartedly in favor of being skipped - and her reasons were social as much as academic.

In July, when the thought of being in a classroom of unfamiliar kids was weighing heavy on her mind, she decided that she was willing to forgo any acceleration in order to stay with kids she knew. So we said, "Take the tests and see how it goes - there's a possibility you'd be a second grader who goes to a third grade class for the ones you pass in," which was true - but I'll admit to leaving out the "but if you pass them all, you'll be a third grader." And honestly, at the time, I did not really expect her to pass as many as she has so far, whereas now I'd be surprised if she didn't pass the remaining ones.

DD is slow to warm to new situations, and while she's improved tremendously over the last year, she still does not like social situation change. She went up a level in swimming last week, and when we got to the pool for the first day of the new class, she said she wasn't going to go to it - that she wanted to be in her old class, instead. I had to pick her up and carry her (thankfully not crying or kicking!) across the pool deck to the new class - where she settled in just fine. I think she will settle in just fine as a third grader, too.

If she had not originally been so strongly in favor of acceleration, we wouldn't have considered it. I think it's something that the kid has to really want. It's just hard to identify what's "what she really wants" and what's "she needs someone to carry her across the deck." And that's where I see the grown-up decision-making coming into play.

When I was 7-nearly-8, I had the opportunity to skip 3rd, and my parents gave me the choice of whether to do it or not. I chose not to - but my reason for not wanting to skip was that I didn't want to miss learning cursive. Had my parents said "Oh, we'll get you a cursive workbook and you can learn it over the summer," I think I would have taken the skip. (My mother has since told me that my parents were indifferent-to-opposed to the skip.) I don't know whether I'd have gotten a good outcome or a bad outcome from a skip, but I do feel that I turned down the skip for the wrong reasons.

Ah, I stand corrected! We got the results of the remaining test back today: 94 for Social Studies, and an 86 in Science. The district person responsible for the program was the one who proctored the test, and she said that DD clearly knew the science material - but she second-guessed herself, and went back and changed right answers to wrong ones. But that, based on her observations, she was recommending the full skip regardless of the shortfall on one section.

An hour or so later, I got a call from the counselor at our school, saying that she and the principal had both approved the skip, and that DD will be enrolled as a 3rd grader for the coming year.

Also, DD says her objection to skipping is "I don't want to be in a class where I don't know anyone," and that spending the full two hours at Meet Your Teacher night getting to know the kids in her class would be a satisfactory way of making sure she wasn't in a class where she didn't know anyone.

well Congrats on the approval! I wish you a smooth transition. We r also doing a skip this yr. we r skipping 3rd and going into 4th. Keep me posted how it's going for you