Also, if the school or curriculum offers a "challenging" version of a course (honors/gifted/advanced), do you consider a "lower" level than you otherwise might?
For us, accelerations are both to find the appropriate level, pace, and peers. This is more likely to be in the honors/gifted classes. However, we're accelerating DD into high school science, and will be placing her into the "regular" class to find a teacher more appropriate to her needs. We've done this with assurance that this won't lock her out of honors classes in subsequent years where the instruction is a little more even.
To find the right level, Developing Math Talent recommends an acceleration for 75-80% mastery, patch the gaps, and move on. For science acceleration, we did that, but also looked at the ACT science reasoning score to establish that DD had sufficient scientific reasoning skills to show she was ready to move past factoid- and contrived-experiment-driven middle school science. It was enough of an acceleration that I also talked with her gifted/language arts teacher to assess that her behavior, organization, and writing skills were sufficient to function in a high school environment.
