Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Does acceleration solve the problem?

the pretest is for THEM so they can see what the class knows and doesn't know.


Exactly!!

I'd use that as a jumping off point for why this is a perfect thing for pretty much everyone involved-- no more worries about gaps, since that would show up right away, and then the teacher would know to talk with parents or the other teacher about remediation for that topic, the student gets to spend some time actually learning what they don't know, etc.

Basically, that IS the idea-- it's just for an individual student, not for a whole group of them.

I think this is what I tried to accomplish with the last teacher and it didn't go so well. At the beginning of first grade I asked if she would give him an above-level test. She never seemed to do it and said she's working on it. Finally at conferences like 6 weeks after school started, she said that she gave him a second grade level CBM test and he scored 89 percent. She said she can't send him to second grade for math because of the class schedule. She said she'd give him a second grade workbook. I said "Ok, so maybe you could have him do the 11 percent he didn't know on the CBM assessment and then go onto third grade." She agreed. Turned out she never gave this workbook AT ALL...she didn't even enrich the first grade material. When I emailed her three months later nicely asking her "how's the workbook going--did he move onto third grade yet?" (I knew full well he wasn't doing it) she never emailed me back and ignored my request for a conference. When confronted later she admitted she never gave him anything. Who knows if she even gave him an above-level test. She was a jerk about other things and we got in an argument. She told me I'm a bad mom because I don't inital DS's planner (where he wasn't writing anything half the time!). That was when I gave up and took him out, and he got the decent teacher who actually tested him and his overall math score was very high, like the upper 90's percentile-wise, but with all the gaps. I'm not sure if he's been tested again.
If the new teacher tests him maybe she can give him only the things that he isn't getting and move on, but that's exactly what the current teacher is doing. And it presents as kind of a mish-mash of random stuff. I'm not sure if there's anything left of third grade standards that she hasn't given him yet. So in a way, he raced through the second and third grade curriculum in a few months.

It took me two years of talking to classroom teachers to get pretesting for my #1, but when the third grade teacher finally started doing this, she liked it so much, she started offering it to other students, including some who were more bright average than gifted, but still derived some benefit from it.

Part of our plan for next school year is to get school to incorporate some pretesting which we hope will lead to curriculum compacting or subject acceleration. I really hope it works out, but I can see our school saying some of the same things others have mentioned above - since we have already heard excuse after excuse from them.

I should probably keep an eye on this post to see how things turn out and if anyone mentions some things we could try.

Good luck blackcat!

My kid has made perfect scores on certain subject pretest for the entire year, but there hasn't been any change in the instruction. At our school pre-tests are given, but for my student they seem meaningless.

I'm not even sure why they bother with them. They probably heard it was good to do pre-testing without realizing why it was good. Our school system does a lot of the "right" things, but doesn't implement them well.

They do them for "value-added" assessment-- how the end-of-year scores compare with the beginning scores is supposed to tell them whether the teacher is effective.

I wish someone would take note, though, when the student has mastered most of the material at the start of the year-- you can add more value if you teach them new things.

DS came home from school and told me he was pulled out for computerized testing again. He told me his math score and I looked it up. His math score is higher than DD's third grade fall score, and her score was in the 98th percentile (in terms of national percentile).
I also got an IEP meeting notice. I thought this was just going to be an informal meeting and that we could talk about informal modifications to the curriculum. Now someone from the district is going to show up and say that accelerating him is against district policy, giving him advanced work is against policy, blah blah. In fact, the woman from the district who refused to accelerate him this winter was listed on the notice! I about lost my mind and called his IEP manager and asked her what this is all about with that woman being invited! She said that they needed someone from administration and the principal couldn't do it, and this woman is one step above. She (apparently) had no clue that I had had a conflict with her in the past and said she'd un-invite her and find someone else from the district. Ugh, why can't they just keep the gifted stuff separate from the IEP for his disability so that we can keep the ignorant district people out of this!

I'm sure the solution depends on the kids--not all gifted/advanced kids are alike. For my kids, the elementary school offers a little bit of enrichment around whatever topic that the entire class does, with a bit more depth; the middle school offers acceleration (skipping grades). Neither works. The enrichment is not deep enough and the pace is not fast enough. The skipping of grades, well, the kids learn the stuff in the same shallow way that all kids learn, only earlier. We have known all along that my kids need to move at a much faster pace and the material needs to be much deeper. Our solution has been afterschooling and more recently online courses.

That is essentially the solution we are utilizing. We started this spring letting him take a online high school class at home. This has worked to an extent. We haven't told his elementary school as I'm sure it would be perceived as pushing versus giving a kid who craves more, more.

Exactly-- I started buying college gen-ed textbooks for my daughter when she was about nine-- I just didn't tell anyone.

One other thing that we found gave us away with the school, though, was when my then-3rd grader was choosing things like, er... Langston Hughes when asked to "choose a poem" to memorize, that kind of open-ended assignment. We learned to keep an eye on the curriculum four to six grades up after that first year, because she had inadvertently chosen literature selections which were assigned in later grades. whoops!

We also realized that in so doing, the school was frowning at us and assuming that WE were the ones doing it on purpose-- for what reason I'm not sure, but anyway. This is why my DD wasn't allowed to read some novels until they were assigned in High School literature classes, though-- because we had learned that they wouldn't flex around those fixed assignments, so she'd only wind up reading it more than once. That happened anyway with a few things, because the curriculum shifted under us as she went. Walt Whitman was added to tenth grade when she was an 8th grader, for example-- but a full year after she'd read a bunch of his more notable works. {sigh}

And really, as playandlearn noted, neither acceleration nor enrichment is a real solution beyond some LOG; it has to be both at a minimum. This often pushes school teachers and administrators so far out of their comfort zones that they simply shut down and refuse to see what is right in front of them.