Radical acceleration does work for some gifted children. Here is an example from the news.
http://www.macfound.org/fellows/887/Colin Camerer
Behavioral Economist
Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA
Age: 53
Colin Camerer is a pioneering economist whose research challenges assumptions about human behavior in the traditional models used by economists. Particularly adept at designing original and effective empirical experiments to explore and refine economists’ predictive models, Camerer’s seminal studies provide strong evidence of the inconsistencies between classical economic principles of rationality and observed choices and behavior of real people, leading to new theories. -
Colin Camerer: The early professional years of a radical educational accelerant
Holmes, J. S., Rin, L., Tremblay, J. M. & Zeldin, R. K.
Gifted Child Today
Vol. 33, pp. 33-35
May/June 1984
This article, written by students in the Johns Hopkins University gifted-child class, takes a look at the early professional years of Colin Camerer, a radical educational accelerant. He shares his views on acceleration as well as some of his experiences. Authored by John Holmes, Li-Hsien Rin, Joanne Tremblay and Robert Zeldin.
It is customary for most high school juniors to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) prior to applying to college. During 1972-1979 a select group of twelve-year-olds, by virtue of scoring in the top three percent scholastically on any standardized aptitude test, were encouraged by the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) at The John Hopkins University to take the SAT at this early age. A small number of these individuals scored greater than 600 on the SAT-verbal section and greater than 700 on the SAT-math section.
Colin Farrell Camerer, a member of this group, was one of the first mathematically talented youngsters aided by SMPY at Johns Hopkins. At age 11 he had a Stanford-Binet IQ of 160, and at age 13 he scored 750 out of a possible 800 on the SAT-M and 610 out of 800 on the SAT-V (corresponding to the 99th and 93rd percentiles, respectively, of college-bound 12th-grade males). With the support of SMPY and Psychology Professor Julian C. Stanley of Johns Hopkins, he skipped five years of schooling and finished his B.A. at Johns Hopkins the month he turned 17. In September of 1981 he became a 21-year-old assistant professor at Northwestern University.
