In the mid-1990s, Susan Assouline, Nicholas Colangelo, and Ann Lupkowski-Shoplik combined their professional expertise to develop a tool to guide educators and parents through the decision-making process for whole-grade acceleration. Assouline drew on her background as a regular classroom teacher and school psychologist, Colangelo called on his experiences as a regular classroom teacher and school counselor, and Lupkowski-Shoplik relied on her expertise in early childhood development and giftedness. Soon after the development of the form, Assouline, Colangelo, and Lupkowski-Shoplik invited two Belin-Blank Center doctoral students, Jonathan Lipscomb and Leslie Forstadt, to be a part of the team and coauthors of the Iowa Acceleration Scale (IAS), described in this entry.

Together, they developed a 20-item survey that is divided into 10 sections; 4 specific sections compose the ...