Acceleration Options

After years of controversy, it is now generally agreed by scholars of gifted education that acceleration is the best educational arrangement for gifted students. Several events turned the tide among scholars to bring about this consensus. First of all, when most schools in the 1970s adamantly opposed providing acceleration to gifted children—based on nonempirical beliefs that acceleration was deleterious to children's emotional and social development, and on the spurious linking of acceleration with “tracking”—Julian Stanley and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University determined that the only way to provide this much-needed programming was for universities to do so through talent searches and out-of-school courses. Talent search programs permitted seventh graders who scored at or above the mean for high school seniors on out-of-level achievement tests to take accelerated, collegelevel courses. These programs, now internationally available, have a database built over 35 years for tens of thousands of students. Long-term follow-up studies of adults who received accelerated instruction through talent search programs not only showed that they continued their rapid learning and high achievement, but also became productive and successful adults. A second event was the development of sophisticated statistical techniques for analyzing the results of many studies of acceleration. These meta-analyses, most prominently those of James Kulik and Chen-Lin [Page 11]Kulik and of Karen Rogers, have shown definitively that acceleration works—not only to increase academic achievement, but also to promote social and emotional adjustment. A third event was the publication of A Nation Deceived: How America Holds Back Its Brightest Students, by Nicolas Colangelo, Susan Assouline, and Miraca Gross. This publication, sponsored by the Templeton Foundation and made available to the public for free downloading, achieved worldwide attention for the needs of gifted children to be accelerated. It provided a summary of the straight facts about acceleration, the options available for acceleration, and a resource listing all the research to date in support of this educational strategy. Finally, the recent recognition by policymakers that nations' economic health depends on a large pool of intellectual talent, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), has made more funding available to study ways of increasing the talent pool in the sciences and enhancing persistence toward higher degrees. Most of these STEM studies point to early, rigorous education.

Paradoxically, no educational arrangement for which there is so much research support has received so much opposition from general educators. Creating optimal acceleration programs for gifted children continues to be an uphill battle in most schools, particularly in countries with either strong histories of anti-intellectualism or fears of elitism. Because of this, teachers who wish to provide accelerated instruction, and parents who want to pursue this course for their children, often turn to a variety of acceleration options that can provide, at least in part, fast-paced learning for high-ability children. A Nation Deceived provides comprehensive information about 18 acceleration options that can be grouped into two categories: whole grade acceleration and subject acceleration. These options are listed as follows:

• Early admission to kindergarten
• Early admission to first grade
• Grade skipping
• Continuous progress
• Self-paced instruction
• Subject-matter acceleration/partial acceleration
• Combined classes
• Curriculum compacting
• Telescoping curriculum
• Mentoring
• Extracurricular programs
• Correspondence courses
• Early graduation
• Concurrent/dual enrollment
• Advanced Placement
• Credit by examination
• Acceleration in college
• Early entrance into middle

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