Academic acceleration
[6] Effective administration involves ensuring student readiness, both academic and social-emotional, and providing necessary support and resources.
[4] The influential 2004 U.S. report A Nation Deceived articulated 20 benefits of academic acceleration, which can be further distilled into four key points:[7] The 2015 follow-up to that report, A Nation Empowered, highlights the research that has occurred over the past decade, and provides further evidence that academic acceleration, when applied correctly, can be highly beneficial for gifted students.
A longitudinal study conducted over 35 years and published in 2020 in the Journal of Educational Psychology from Vanderbilt's Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth finds that there are no effects on the long-term well-being of gifted youth from academic acceleration such as skipping grades, graduating early, or a combination of advanced educational placement methods.
While not, in and of itself, a practice designed for acceleration, in some instances this placement can allow younger students to interact academically and socially with older peers.
[17] As with extracurricular acceleration, when using distance or correspondence courses, the student enrolls in coursework delivered outside of normal school instruction.
[22] In many US school districts, early admission requires evaluation, which may include a mock class to test emotional readiness.
[26] In particular, the IAS identifies four conditions under which grade skipping is unwise: In extracurricular acceleration, students elect to enroll in weekend, after-school or summer programs that confer advanced instruction and/or credit.
In some cases this will allow especially radical acceleration in content, such as a primary-school student taking university-level extension classes.
[30] In a telescoped curriculum, the student is provided instruction that entails less time than is normal (e. g., completing a one-year course in one semester, or three years of middle school in two).
[31] This practice allows students to be placed with classes with older peers for a part of the day (or with materials from higher grade placements) in one or more content areas.
[28] Effective subject-matter acceleration requires the cooperation of teachers in subsequent grades, so that the student is not forced to repeat the material.
Mentoring of gifted high school students by successful adults often has beneficial long-term effects, including improved focus on career goals.
Research has found that nearly half of academically talented students (as measured by high scores on above-level tests) are not labeled "gifted" by their schools.
African American, Latino and Indigenous students consistently perform lower on these exams due to a variety of cultural and institutional reasons.
Implicit biases and cultural differences contribute to the mis-categorization or oversight of African American, Latino and other students of color.
IQ tests prioritize a set binary of intelligence factors which often discounts experiential and contextual expressions.
[39] Attempts to lessen racial inequality in programs of academic acceleration and gifted education continue in experiments across the United States.
