Academic Advising

Academic advising is individualized guidance in academic planning. At every stage of the educational process, gifted students need advisors who can help them select appropriate educational opportunities. Sound academic advice can come from many sources, including family members, community members, teachers, mentors, and professional advisors. This article discusses academic advising for gifted children from preschool through college.

Often, the first people to become aware that a young child is gifted are the child's parents. Parents of young gifted children are often desperate for guidance on how to meet their children's academic needs. Before the advent of the Web, such advice could be hard for parents of gifted toddlers and preschoolers to find. Now, excellent Web sites such as http://www.hoagiesgifted.org allow parents to contact other parents of gifted children, as well as experts in the field of gifted education, and to find educational materials and programs that will benefit their children. As parents are often their children's foremost educational advocates, an early acquaintance with the academic advice and resources available online may be invaluable for them.

When the child enters school, new potential sources of academic advice become available, including teachers and administrators. Although these individuals may know what the child has accomplished in the classroom setting, they may not be aware of the child's true capabilities: A preschool curriculum that introduces the numbers from 1 to 10, for example, will not allow a child who can count to 1,000 and add and subtract mul-tidigit numbers in his or her head to demonstrate his or her abilities.

In order to ensure that a child has access to appropriately stimulating work, a team approach to academic planning, involving parents, teachers, school administrators, and professionals expert in the use of aptitude and achievement testing for gifted students is essential. Test results, along with information about the child's interests, activities, and achievements provided by the parents, can help team members understand what the child already knows, what the child is ready to learn, and how quickly he or she is likely to learn it. The team can then use its knowledge of resources available at the school as well as those available from other sources, such as distance learning programs, to design an academic plan for the child. Good communication between team members, as well as close attention to the child's response to the newly provided [Page 4]academic opportunities, will allow the plan to be modified appropriately as the child grows.

Because many school districts do not identify children as gifted or offer aptitude or achievement testing for children before the second or third grade, parents of gifted preschoolers and early elementary students may be forced to seek outside testing and academic advice. Many gifted education Web sites list organizations, such as the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins (CTY), that offer such testing along with academic advising for gifted students.

Though academic planning is a process that should include input from both adults and from the child, the balance between the adults' involvement and the child's involvement must shift as the child grows older. At the preschool and early elementary levels, children's direct input will probably be limited, although their wishes should be considered in the development of an academic plan. By middle school, however, school personnel expect a student to be directly involved in making academic choices, as is clear from the inclusion of electives in the typical U.S. middle school curriculum. The transition from adult-directed academic choices to student-directed academic choices should thus begin no later than elementary school.

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