Chiming in here to say I see the same thing in DS9. He's been accelerated too, and is having trouble slowing down. I was actually thinking of starting a thread about it!
I don't know if harder work is the answer in his case. I'd be grateful for input, though.
His problem is that he doesn't pay attention to details. I wonder if it's a maturity thing. For example, his math teachers agree that he learns concepts very quickly and that he has a very strong understanding of them. The problem is that his computational work is subpar. So, he knows that the decimal point needs to be in x position, but he makes a mistake because he's rushing and his columns skewed to the left or right and a decimal point moves. Alternatively, he'll make a simple mistake in long division when doing a conversion problem. In other subjects, he rushes to finish and so doesn't do as well as he might.
I've tried to give him step-by-step instructions (1. Copy formula. 2. Plug numbers in. 3. Do operations. 4. Check work: are signs correct? Does answer make sense?). This approach worked earlier this year, but I seem to need to repeat it more than I have been!
Overall, I do think it's a maturity problem.
Val
