Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Test results- grade skip or better not to?

I feel confused--aren't there other kids at the magnet with needs similar to your DD?

That would be a big piece I'd want answered before making decisions re grade skipping for your dd. My grade skipped dd was very young for grade preskip and it was still the right choice so I wouldn't let that one piece be the deciding factor. However, I absolutely would want an Iowa Acceleration Scale filled out. My dd was still an excellent candidate for a skip even factoring her age in on the IAS so I know that age alone shouldn't rule a child out.

To be honest I don't know exactly how able my dd is (her one IQ test was administered by a grad student, dd was't wildly cooperative, her speed issues certainly depressed parts, and she had some very high spots in the 19+ area). I feel comfortable, though, in saying that her IQ scores and achievement since then pre and postskip indicate a child who is probably somewhat above the 99th percentile but probably not 99.9th. Skipping really did seem not only to be an acceptable choice for her but necessary for the reasons I mentioned earlier.

If your dd is in a magnet, though, where her IQ is fairly close to the other students' and her needs are still not getting met, I'd have a few questions:

Is it possible that they start out slow but will better meet her, and the other students', needs later?

Might her IQ scores be well off?

Are the entry requirements much lower than I am thinking?

I wasn't sure fromthe OP what "AG" magnet means - does AG stand for some form of gifted? If it does, I would suspect there would be other students who are in the same ability range as your dd, unless the testing bar was a lot lower than where she's testing in ability. Even then, if it's the only gifted magnet in an area I'd still think there would be a few other kids in her grade level working at her level. That's one piece of info I'd want before making a grade skip decision.

polarbear

AG stands for Academically Gifted, and GT stands for Gifted and Talented. In our area we have a GT magnet school and an AG magnet school. The talented refers to performing arts amongst other things. The AG school has more funding available for gifted education and likely has more teachers certified in gifted education.
We attend the GT school. Even though this school has a G for gifted in its name, there are NO students who are subject accelerated or grade advanced that I know of (and I am fairly well connected within the school). The last time a child was grade advanced was 6 or 7 yrs ago. This is the first time anybody can remember that testing was requested for a Kindergarten student (or any). The teachers involved keep commenting how this is such a great learning opportunity for them since they have never dealth with this before (i.e. referral for testing and interpreting results). I am less than thrilled about this being a new experience for everybody.
This school does not have entry requirements, and should not be seen as a "school for the gifted" IMHO. It is a school with fun art electives, and those considered gifted in the lower grades have pull-out sessions once or twice a week for 45 minutes with the AG teacher.

Ah, so "gifted" magnet in name only. With no entry requirements, I can see as how a 98th percentile kid might be out of the norm then.

FWIW, I don't think that most of the schools we've dealt with have much experience in interpreting test scores or have much experience dealing with kids like my dd14, either, but we have had a few who did a good job recognizing that her needs were rather different than most of the other GT ided kids and who advocated for her as a result.

I just don't have any experience with grade skipping this early in the schooling process. I suspect that there are benefits to doing it sooner and perhaps somewhat greater risks in that you don't know what the child's long-term trajectory looks like. However, none of us can have a crystal ball as to long term trajectory and, if you really feel that her needs cannot be even somewhat met without the skip, there are certainly MG kids who do quite well with grade skips. I wouldn't say that it is only HG-PG kids who need to skip sometimes.

eta: One thing that I suspect would really help your dd out in acceleration is her high processing speed. That has been the one piece that has been a challenge for my grade skipped kiddo b/c her processing speed is truly average, which is very out of step with her other abilities.

Yes, this.

My DD13 is one of a very slim handful of PG kids in our virtual school's entire system (nationwide, I mean, so at least 20K kids, pretty much everyone in Baltimore knows her BY NAME alone). Oh, sure, they have a fairly high frequency of HG kids who are +1 or +2 years accelerated (maybe 10% of the enrollment is kids who are more than MG, at a guess)-- the environment is definitely 'enriched' in those kinds of students because so few schools serve them anything like well...

but kids like mine are still exceedingly rare. There is a vast gulf between what typical students need and what MG ones do, but the difference between MG and HG is just as large.

Our first teacher was fascinated by my description of DD's internalized mastery-learning. I had no idea that it was weird because she's always been this way; apparently that is something that a lot of educators with GT endorsements haven't ever actually seen, but have only heard about.

The upshot is that for many subjects/tasks, the learning is seemingly happening overnight and like a light switch-- nothing-nothing-nothing-nothing... BANG. Complete mastery, inside-and-out, often of a fairly wide swathe of material. There is no "practice and revise, rinse-and-repeat" for her. At that point, further instruction really is a waste of time, and probably damages the relationship between teacher and student because the point should be on the learning, right? Not on "compliance."

Nothing short of extremely flexible placement and pacing is truly appropriate for a student like that-- and the more inflexible the placement(s), the worse the fit gets. All of our troubles with the school come down to a lack of flexibility. ALL of them.

I'm a bit jaded at this point, but my basic feeling is that it is seldom the case that a "gradeskip solves problems." Maybe it makes the match between student readiness and curriculum less apparent, but it doesn't remove problems which actually exist in most cases. Why not? Because a school that is flexible enough to work for an HG+ child is going to do what they can without a gradeskip (mostly), and one that isn't is ONLY going to do the skip and then blame any future difficulties on the student's immaturity or the parent's unrealistic expectations. Yes, cynical of me, I realize, but that is how I tend to see this working for more people than not.

A gradeskip alone doesn't solve the underlying problem of inflexible pedagogy and rigid thinking.

Mind. Blown.


I need to think about this statement some more, but it feels like it totally reframes the struggles that we have with DD8's school. Thank you.

I'm pretty sure that HowlerKarma's dd is more gifted than mine and, while I do agree for the most part with what she said above, I wouldn't want it to turn you off to the idea that grade skips can be beneficial. While we, too, have found that the way dd learns still isn't a fit for the way schools are set up, school isn't horrible.

For her it is the difference btwn a kid who spent her school days tutoring the other students even in her weak subjects and who, in the early elementary yrs was depressed to the point that she sat at her desk crying in class to a kid who has needed a differentiated learning plan and for whom some of the classes still are not a great fit but who isn't totally wasting her time at least.

Right on all counts-- make no mistake, we are most emphatically NOT sorry for doing acceleration...

and I'll also add that (IMO) the most crucial time to make that fit better is early.

That's when kids are learning what school is for, more or less. If they learn that it is about compliance, punishment, socializing with others, being a teacher's aide, and NOT about trying one's best and learning, that is a disaster that can be awful to remediate later. It's also when children who have mastery of basic numeracy and literacy can spend the greatest percentage of their time bored; the gap is widest then. In an eerie coincidence, this is also when they develop a reputation for 'problem behaviors' in some classrooms. Bored 6yo's trapped in inappropriate learning environments don't have the same kind of impulse control and maturity that bored adults do when trapped in mind-numbing meetings. Or maybe they just don't have access to smartphones.

DD13's gradeskips worked (relatively well-- as cricket and kcab both note, we've traded really-bad problems for other problems, basically) because we were working with a set of school administrators and teachers who ARE flexible and helpful. Mostly. When we've had one or two who aren't, it really shows us just how horrific it would be without that bit of things. That's why I'm so confident in stating that if your school takes the outlook that acceleration = "our work here is finished, now go forth and prosper" then it may not work very well.

One trade, though, is that my DD appears (on paper, at least and increasingly in person) to be a fairly typical, high-achieving MG/HG junior in HS. She does not necessarily 'appear' to be what she actually IS; a PG kid doing amazing quality work four to six years beyond what her age would predict even for most GT kids, and struggling mightily with ongoing asynchrony. One additional reason for this is that it is still the case that the work is simply not "appropriate" in terms of pacing and depth, though it's quite high in terms of output demands (busywork, mostly). She probably won't get a perfect 2400 on her SAT's this spring, and probably narrowly missed NMSF levels in our state-- meh. That's a trade-off. She's in the 95th-99th percentile pretty regularly, not the 99.99th because of the acceleration, but on the other hand, without it, she'd be so completely shut down that she wouldn't appear to be at that higher level anyway. It's obvious; she does paradoxically more sloppy and thoughtless work on easier tasks.

Kids who need the acceleration are often caught in something of a no-win situation. Because doing nothing for them certainly isn't better than giving them something more appropriate to do, but acceleration also isn't entirely "giving them appropriate" things to do. The fit might be better, which isn't to say that it's actually going to be good, or that you will have improved everything without worsening anything.

This is why the IAS is important, and it's also why schools look at some subscores carefully. Individual areas of strength and weakness can interact with different curricula in pretty predictable ways, and often the school is in the best position to know what obstacles lie ahead in that path.

As Kcab notes, having the discussions is generally a good thing, because it definitely provides much-needed information for everyone no matter what happens.

This is exactly where we are with dd as well. She appears to be a gifted 10th grader but is generally 18 - 24 months younger than her grade peers now and still has some significant asynchrony that is hard to get schools to see when they forget that she is younger and still rather different than similarly performing kids in her grade who are considerably older. Kind of like the Columbus Group definition of giftedness that notes how the asynchrony increases with increasing levels of giftedness - were she really a MG+ 15 or 16 y/o rather than a HG 14 y/o she probably would have different needs and less need for ongoing individualization.