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.
Last edited by marieg; 08/24/09 12:28 PM.
