Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research The value of gifted education

A couple of years ago, there was an academic article that examined the impact of gifted education curriculum for students on the margin of being accepted/denied to the program on subsequent test scores.

The main takeaway was that "learning with stronger peers did not yield a test score boost"

This was discussed in prior threads here
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....rning_With_Stronger_Peer.html#Post177330

and http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....h/true/An_article_in_WSJ.html#Post104833


I wanted to add some evidence to the discussion with another paper that provides a slightly different set of conclusions that has not been discussed in this forum as far as I can tell.

The paper was published in a prestigious economics journal in 2007 and is available here:
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article...rs-Affect-Student-Achievement-in-China-s


The gist is that they being with better peers (with no changes in curriculum) led to better results. The benefit of their study is that they are able to use quixotic rules governing how students are assigned in China to provide quasi-experimental evidence of the effects. The caveat is that these results are based on students in China, and may obviously not apply to the US.

Anyhow just thought to share...

The effectiveness of gifted education might depend on various factors including the specific curricula used, the individual student's learning style, and the overall educational environment.

They're looking at 2 slightly different things. One of the problems with gifted programs, especially in public schools, is that they're not really calibrated to differences between gifted kids. And more importantly, they're not really advanced learning environments.

This quote:
"...reducing the variation of peer performance increases achievement..."

Is sort of the problem in a nutshell with gifted education. They don't really achieve that. They'll have kids in the 99.9th percentile in the same class as kids in the 95th percentile with no real appreciation for the variation in peer performance at those levels.

A gifted school or any system where the placement is truly ability based and advancement based on that would probably yield results closer to the Chinese study. But gifted programs in public schools are rarely that.

I remember how morose my son was when, in 4th grade, a well-meaning substitute teacher gave him a booklet of sixth grade maths to complete. His regular teachers would just let him ponder the maths videos that he watched at home and at that time, he was interested in how infinite sets of numbers relate to each other. Out of politeness, he completed her booklet and then he asked her not to give him any more exercises unless she actually evaluated the level of his maths abilities and thereafter he was left (happily) to his own devices again. Objectively, that year, the school entered him in a sixth grade level maths competition and, without any effort into preparation, his score was within the top 1% of sixth graders nationally and in the following two years of the competition, he achieved perfect scores.

In this age of digital technology and highly connected information networks, the ‘best’ form of gifted education in primary schools, ill-equiped to teach the very highly gifted, may simply be to give them access to resources for self-directed learning.

Edited to add: I will forever be indebted to the Head of the Maths Dept of our local high school who realised at the start of 7th grade that he had already mastered most of the Yr 7-10 curriculum but that there were a few gaps. She consulted teachers at other schools and decided that the best approach was to use an online maths program which included pre-topic assessments, so that students could skip topics they had already mastered, but ensured that they covered the entire curriculum. If my memory serves correctly, he skipped all of the Yr 7 topics, more than 90% of Yr 8, 70-80% of Yr 9 and more than half of Yr 10 and he was able to cover all of the outstanding topics in the first six months of high school.