Academic acceleration for gifted children has become very popular in school, but there are many debates on this issue. Is academic acceleration good for gifted children?
Gifted children tend to learn much faster than normal children. Therefore, many countries are providing academic acceleration for gifted children to appropriate their quality learning ability. Academic acceleration can be defined as an effective way for high ability students to move more rapidly through the traditional educational system than typical students, commonly by skipping one or two grades in primary or secondary school. As a consequence, they are younger than their classmates. A number of people debate about whether the implications of academic acceleration are beneficial
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It is huge pressure that may make them stressed and lead to decline in subjects. However, a research paper related to academic acceleration pointed out that not only can gifted children skip grades without any negative influences, but also, it would provide lots of benefits for academic progress (Southern & Jones, 2004). For example, according to the research of Sayler and Brookshire (1993) few accelerated gifted students think their new course is more difficult than they had taken at the very beginning. However, based on their strong learning abilities and positive learning attitudes they are able to access advanced courses as well as their typical older classmates. They even get higher scores and tend to received more awards in schooling. Furthermore, other evidence shows a similar result (Janos & Robinson, 1985). Particularly, grade skipping students enter college earlier than normal students even though a majority of them can earn a high degree by their natural intelligence skills, efficient learning strategies and clarity of vision in higher education (Castellanos,
Jarosewich, T., Pfeiffer, S. I., & Morris, J. (2002). Identifying gifted students using teacher rating scales: A review of existing instruments. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 20(4), 322-336.
A common misconception is intelligence is inherited and does not change, so therefore, gifted children do not need special services. However, this mindset is very dangerous when it comes to the development of gifted children. It is widely believed that gifted students will get by on their own without any assistance from their school. After all,
The problem associated with how students are chosen to join a gifted and talented program stems from the way that we define giftedness. Because there are countless ways in which any individual can define talent, the government created a federal task force in 1972 to study gifted education in order to standardize the way in which schools choose students for and implement their gifted and talented programs. The task force’s results are known as the Marland Report and include much information as a result of their research, including a decision that a public school’s gifted and talented programs should aim to serve between 3 and 5 percent o...
They have been termed as a group of underserved and under stimulated youth by most localities. Brody and Mills [1997] argue that this population of students "could be considered the most misunderstood of all exceptionalities." This occurs because it is difficult for educational professionals to reconcile the twice-exceptional learner’s extreme strengths with their noticeable weaknesses. A GRT should seek to understand the roles and responsibilities that their school districts have documented. This can be extremely challenging because each district may have varying viewpoints as well as each school. “Federal regulations do not exist for gifted education services. Overall guidelines for school divisions to identify and serve gifted students are provided in the Virginia Regulations Governing Educational Services for Gifted Students at 8VAC20-40-10 et. seq. Each school division provides its own identification of and services for gifted students in accordance with its local plan for gifted education. However, the gifted education regulations acknowledge the underrepresentation of students who are culturally different, have disabilities, or come from low socioeconomic backgrounds in gifted education programs. As a result, school divisions are encouraged to make an effort to identify for gifted education services students with disabilities and
The Talents Unlimited Model was created under the philosophy that all students, both those identified as gifted and those not, would benefit from enrichment programs. The model is used to educate teachers on how to use differentiated instruction to use “higher order cognitive tasks to help students with varying abilities use their preferred thinking talents to manipulate instruction to solve problems, see broad relationships, evaluate varying perspectives, draw comparisons among disparate viewpoints, and predict causes and effects” (Schlichter, 2009, p. 434).
Whitney, C. S. & Hirsch, G. (2011). Helping Gifted Children Soar. A Practical Guide for
There is a phenomenon happening in most schools throughout the country. Asian students as young as seven years olds are labeled as gifted and enrolled in various accelerate programs to further develop their talents. Certainly, most of these students are deserving of the honorable recognition. However, many skeptics do question how many of them are viewed as exceptional students based upon the stereotype: they are genetically smarter than their non-Asian peers.
Sankar-DeLeeuw, N (2004) Case studies of gifted kindergarten children: profiles of promise. (On Gifted Students in School) Roeper Review, v26 i4 p192(16)
The Gifted program exists to provide more academic opportunities for those who qualify as “gifted.” “’Gifted means performing or demonstrating the potential for performing at significantly higher levels of accomplishment in one or more academic fields due to intellectual ability, when compared to others of similar age, experience, and environment’” (Quoted in “Gifted”). In order to make it into the program the student must show higher intellectual ability than the average student at his or her age, but what determines that factor? The student must take a multidimensional test and score in the 98th percentile. However, the most weighted part of the test remains an average IQ test. Intelligence test scores should not be the primary qualification for admittance into the gifted program. They should not remain the primary qualification because it allows the minorities and the economically disadvantaged to be underrepresented, it proves insufficient when compared to other means of testing, and it fails to accurately reflect a student’s intelligence.
The community participation that has changed my life for the better is being apart of The Accelerated College Education (ACE) program at American River College. Being apart of this program has given me a push and motivation to finish and succeed in school. Before I started in the American River College ACE program, college success was not always a part of my college career. I have been and will always consider myself a part of the ACE program community in which I have participated in for the past two years. Unfortunately, I am no longer among the rest of my cohort classmates that have been a part of this amazing community. Looking back I now see that the time was well spent in the ACE program. The experiences were life changing in this program
Whether giftedness is a product of nature or created through nurture is a controversial discussion. However, Winner (2000), Colangelo & Davis (2003), Mrazik & Dombrowski (2010) all agree the answer lies somewhere in the middle. The idea of giftedness is often evaluated under the premise of expertness or mastery. Do all gifted children become masters or experts of their gifted area? Can people become gifted through extensive training (which is required for expertness)? Winner states that families cannot make a child become gifted, however, certain parenting styles that combine nurturance and stimulation can help maintain and nurture the gift. Winner reviewed many studies on hard work, perseverance, and practice, none of which can explain the origins of giftedness, but are very necessary for high achievement. Colangelo and Davis propose that high intelligence alone will not provide high levels of achievement, but may be necessary for achievement.
Many people are of the opinion that special education programs for gifted children are an unnecessary burden on tightly-budgeted and under-funded school systems, but this is actually far from the truth. The gifted are perhaps the most neglected group of special needs children in almost every school district. Because many people assume that the gifted do not need extra attention, gifted programs are often the first program to be cut when budgets are reduced, but I suggest that they be the last to go. These children have profound talents and are just as deserving of extra attention as children who are physically or mentally handicapped.
One of the most controversial things about gifted and talented education is the criterion educators use to identify the gifted and talented. In the past, a student’s intelligence, based on an I.Q. score, was considered the best way to determine whether or not they qualified as gifted. As a result of using this method of identification, many gifted and talented students are not discovered nor are they placed in the appropriate programs to develop their abilities. Talents in the arts or an excellent ability to write are not measured on an I.Q. test but are abilities that may certainly qualify a student as gifted or talented.
What if you woke up on your first day of fifth grade, ready for whatever life had to throw at you, and you realize that kids have changed? They were bigger, stronger, and more emotionally hardened than you, who had skipped fourth grade. This was the case for actor Ken Newman. He was picked on for being the ‘small kid’, and the bullying only got worse through high school. He went on to Cornell University as a fifteen-year-old, still wearing braces and not shaving.
Parke, B. (n.d.). Challenging gifted students in the regular classroom. Retrieved March 1, 2004, from http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content/Challenging_gifted _kids.html