High-ability students have unique academic, cognitive, and social needs. Many bright students need more academic challenge than they are receiving in their education, and they need more opportunities to develop their talent. Yet many states and school districts have no formal policies that address the desirability of acceleration or specify the procedures to be followed in making decisions about acceleration for particular students. Absence of a formal policy might invite inconsistent practices that could As an educational intervention, academic acceleration is decidedly effective for high-ability students. The research support for acceleration that has accumulated over many decades is robust and consistent and allows us to confidently state that carefully planned acceleration decisions are successful. Both grade-based and content-based acceleration are effective interventions in academic and social-emotional domains for high-ability students. Grade-accelerated students generally outperform their chronologically older classmates academically, and both groups show approximately equal levels of social and emotional adjustment.Accelerated students should be expected to achieve, relative to their new grade peers, at a high level that is generally comparable to their performance in the previous grade. Such students are typically among the top 10% in a class, and they should be expected to remain in the top 10% throughout their academic careers. To be clear, there is no evidence that acceleration has a negative effect on a student's social-emotional development. Each school district should have a written acceleration policy stating that acceleration is an appropriate and effective intervention for select highly able students who have demonstrated high performance in one or more academic areas. The policy should be characterized by accessibility, equity, and openness. It should provide guidelines for the implementation of acceleration, including administrative matters, to ensure fair and systematic use of accelerative opportunities and recognition for participation in those accelerative opportunities. Finally, the policy should provide guidelines for preventing nonacademic barriers to the use of acceleration as an educational intervention and include features that prevent unintended consequences of acceleration.
The benefits of whole-grade acceleration for the highest achieving students in K-12 education are widely acknowledged. However, much less is known about which personal, family, and school factors are correlated with student acceleration. Which children are grade accelerated in K-7 education? Have factors associated with grade acceleration changed over time? We analyze data from the NELS (students from 1988-1992) and the ELS (students from 2002-2004) nationally representative and longitudinal databases to answer these questions. Other things being equal, females, Asian Americans, and students living on the U.S. east or west coast were more likely to be grade accelerated. For example, females had odds of being accelerated that were 1.3 times higher than the odds of males being accelerated. Students from the northeastern region of the U.S. had odds of acceleration that were nearly twice (1.9 times) as high as Midwest students’ odds of acceleration. When accelerated students were compared to older classmates of similar achievement who were not accelerated, the accelerated students showed greater gains in achievement than nonaccelerated classmates in and throughout high school. In other words, accelerated students do not just keep up with their older classmates, they actually perform better.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.