Grade skipping

Last updated

Grade skipping is a form of academic acceleration, [1] often used for academically talented students, that enables the student to skip entirely the curriculum of one or more years of school. Grade skipping allows students to learn at an appropriate level for their cognitive abilities, and is normally seen in schools that group students primarily according to their chronological age, rather than by their individual developmental levels. Grade skipping is usually done when a student is sufficiently advanced in all school subjects, so that they can move forward in all subjects or graduate, rather than in only one or two areas. There are alternatives to grade skipping.

Contents

Timing and other factors

Grade acceleration is easiest to implement through an early start to school by either entering pre-kindergarten a year early or skipping pre-kindergarten into kindergarten directly. [2] By starting the child ahead, many of the problems associated with grade skipping, such as leaving friends behind or knowledge gaps, are avoided. [3]

Other key factors to a successful grade skip include the desire of the student and the receptivity of the receiving teacher. All these factors have been studied and organized into a survey called The Iowa Acceleration Scale (IAS), which when completed yields a recommendation on whether or not to accelerate an individual student. The IAS also cited four critical situations in which grade skipping is not recommended. These conditions can include:

  1. If the learner scored less than 115 on an intelligence test;
  2. If the learner is moved up into the same grade as an older sibling, which could lead to sibling rivalry;
  3. If the learner is currently within the same grade as a sibling; and,
  4. If the learner does not want to be grade skipped. [4]

Cost-effectiveness

Grade skipping is one of the most cost-effective ways of addressing the needs of a profoundly gifted student[ citation needed ], as it requires no extra resources [5] and little more than assigning the child to a different classroom, without the expense of special materials, tutoring, or separate programs. The cost of educating the gifted child in a regular classroom with typical same-age peers is the same as the cost of educating that child in a regular classroom with typical somewhat older students, so grade skipping is essentially cost-free to the school. [6]

Potential problems

There are many common objections to grade skipping. Common issues raised are that students are often harmed by being placed in an environment for which they are academically ready but emotionally or socially not [2] and that some students may end up with knowledge gaps compared to their peers if not properly prepared. [2]

Knowledge gaps

The time that the student skips may create a knowledge gap if the child has not self-studied the material already taught to the students in the grade being entered. [2] While the student is bridging this gap they will likely find the new material challenging. It may be demoralizing to leave a situation in which they are top performers into a situation where they are struggling with the material.

Social concerns

Unless the skipped students are already in a multi-grade class, students entering a new grade after being in school are usually taken out of their existing classes and put into new classes, with different students. [2] Similar to what happens to students who change schools due to moving to a new home, spending less time with former classmates may disrupt some social ties, and there may be a period of stress while the students integrate into their new classes. Although this change is perceived as a potential problem by adults who think it is normal for children to only have friends of exactly the same age, many gifted children find it easier to make friends with children their age. [2]

Alternatives

Alternatives to grade skipping include:

See also

Related Research Articles

Social promotion is the educational practice of promoting a student to the next grade at the end of a school year, regardless of whether they learned the necessary material or if they were often absent. This is done to keep the students with their peers by age, the intended social grouping. It is sometimes referred to as promotion based on seat time, or the time the child spends sitting in school. This is based on the enrollment criteria for kindergarten, which is being 4 or 5 years old at the beginning of the school year. The intention is for the students to be able to graduate from high school-level education before their 19th birthday.

Gifted education is a sort of education used for children who have been identified as gifted or talented.

When children are young, schools begin to analyze the youngsters’ abilities and sort them into clusters based on their predicted success. The system labels the cream of the crop as gifted. Clark (2002) defines giftedness as “only a label that society gives to those who have actualized their ability to an unusually high degree or give evidence that such achievement is imminent”. The American government defines giftedness as “students, children or youth who give evidence of high performance capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who require services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop such capabilities”. Gifted students learn in a different manner and at an accelerated rate compared to their peers in the classroom and therefore require gifted programs to develop and apply their talents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ability grouping</span> Practice of grouping students by levels of educational achievement

Ability grouping is the educational practice of grouping students by potential or past achievement for a relevant activity. Ability groups are usually small, informal groups formed within a single classroom. It differs from tracking by being less pervasive, involving much smaller groups, and by being more flexible and informal.

Educational stages are subdivisions of formal learning, typically covering early childhood education, primary education, secondary education and tertiary education. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recognizes nine levels of education in its International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) system. UNESCO's International Bureau of Education maintains a database of country-specific education systems and their stages. Some countries divide levels of study into grades or forms for school children in the same year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mirman School</span> Independent school in Los Angeles, California, United States

Mirman School is an independent, co-educational school for highly gifted children located at 16180 Mulholland Drive in Bel-Air, Los Angeles, California, United States, with 330 pupils aged 5 to 14. Mirman School is accredited by the California Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges WASC for grades K-8. Mirman is one of a handful of schools for the highly gifted in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Student–teacher ratio</span> The number of attending students divided by the number of teachers in an institution

Student–teacher ratio or student–faculty ratio is the number of students who attend a school or university divided by the number of teachers in the institution. For example, a student–teacher ratio of 10:1 indicates that there are 10 students for every one teacher. The term can also be reversed to create a teacher–student ratio.

English-language learner is a term used in some English-speaking countries such as the United States and Canada to describe a person who is learning the English language and has a native language that is not English. Some educational advocates, especially in the United States, classify these students as non-native English speakers or emergent bilinguals. Various other terms are also used to refer to students who are not proficient in English, such as English as a second language (ESL), English as an additional language (EAL), limited English proficient (LEP), culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD), non-native English speaker, bilingual students, heritage language, emergent bilingual, and language-minority students. The legal term that is used in federal legislation is 'limited English proficient'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Avery Coonley School</span> School in Downers Grove, Illinois, United States

The Avery Coonley School (ACS), commonly called Avery Coonley, is an independent, coeducational day school serving academically gifted students in preschool through eighth grade (approximately ages 3 to 14), and is located in Downers Grove, DuPage County, Illinois. The school was founded in 1906 to promote the progressive educational theories developed by John Dewey and other turn-of-the-20th-century philosophers, and was a nationally recognized model for progressive education well into the 1940s. From 1943 to 1965, Avery Coonley was part of the National College of Education (now National Louis University), serving as a living laboratory for teacher training and educational research. In the 1960s, ACS became a regional research center and a leadership hub for independent schools, and began to focus on the education of the gifted.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tracking (education)</span> Separation of students by ability

Tracking is separating students by academic ability into groups for all subjects or certain classes and curriculum within a school. It may be referred to as streaming or phasing in some schools.

A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students is The Templeton National Report on Acceleration, a report which was published in 2004 and edited by Nicholas Colangelo, Susan G. Assouline, and Miraca Gross. This report argues for the academic acceleration of qualified gifted and talented students, based on the results of studies on outcomes of accelerating and not accelerating high-achieving students. Despite the evidence that acceleration is a beneficial practice when implemented correctly, many teachers and parents are reluctant to accelerate students. The report presents the research on acceleration in an effort to increase the number of students who have access to acceleration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic acceleration</span> Moving students through education faster than typical

Academic acceleration is moving students through an educational program at a rate faster or at an age younger than is typical. Students who would benefit from acceleration do not necessarily need to be identified as gifted in a particular subject. Acceleration places them ahead of where they would be in the regular school curriculum. It has been described as a "fundamental need" for gifted students as it provides students with level-appropriate material. The practice occurs worldwide. The bulk of educational research on academic acceleration has been within the United States.

Educational Inequality is the unequal distribution of academic resources, including but not limited to school funding, qualified and experienced teachers, books, physical facilities and technologies, to socially excluded communities. These communities tend to be historically disadvantaged and oppressed. Individuals belonging to these marginalized groups are often denied access to schools with adequate resources and those that can be accessed are so distant from these communities. Inequality leads to major differences in the educational success or efficiency of these individuals and ultimately suppresses social and economic mobility. Inequality in education is broken down into different types: regional inequality, inequality by sex, inequality by social stratification, inequality by parental income, inequality by parent occupation, and many more.

The term twice exceptional, often abbreviated as 2e, entered educators' lexicons in the mid-1990s and refers to gifted students who have some form of learning or developmental disability. These students are considered exceptional both because of their giftedness and because they are disabled or neurodivergent. Ronksley-Pavia (2015) presents a conceptual model of the co-occurrence of disability and giftedness.

Cluster grouping is an educational process in which four to six gifted and talented (GT) or high-achieving students or both are assigned to an otherwise heterogeneous classroom within their grade to be instructed by a teacher who has had specialized training in differentiating for gifted learners. Clustering can be contrasted with other ability-grouping strategies in which high achievers fill their own dedicated class, entirely separate from other students.

Gifted pull-outs are an educational approach in which gifted students are removed from a heterogeneous (mixed-ability) classroom to spend a portion of their time with academic peers. Pull-outs tend to meet one to two hours per week. The students meet with a teacher to engage in enrichment or extension activities that may or may not be related to the curriculum being taught in the regular classroom. Pull-out teachers in some states are not required to have any formal background in gifted education.

The racial achievement gap in the United States refers to disparities in educational achievement between differing ethnic/racial groups. It manifests itself in a variety of ways: African-American and Hispanic students are more likely to earn lower grades, score lower on standardized tests, drop out of high school, and they are less likely to enter and complete college than whites, while whites score lower than Asian Americans.

Multi-age classrooms or composite classes are classrooms with students from more than one grade level. They are created because of a pedagogical choice of a school or school district. They are different from split classes which are formed when there are too many students for one class – but not enough to form two classes of the same grade level. Composite classes are more common in smaller schools; an extreme form is the one-room school.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elementary schools in the United States</span> Primary education in the United States

In the United States, elementary schools are the main point of delivery of primary education, for children between the ages of 4–11 and coming between pre-kindergarten and secondary education.

References

  1. Salkind, Neil J. (2008). Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. p. 5. ISBN   978-1-4129-1688-2.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Dominick Campbell, Nicholas Colangelo, N., Assouline, S., and Gross, M., A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students, University of Iowa, Volume I
  3. Gierus, Alex. (29 August 2012) "The Benefits of Skipping a Grade" Perfecting Parenthood.
  4. Rogers, Karen B. (2002). Re-forming Gifted Education: Matching the Program to the Child. Scottsdale, AZ: Great Potential Press, Inc. p. 169. ISBN   0-910707-46-4.
  5. Jolly, Jennifer L. (2018). A History of American Gifted Education. Oxon: Routledge. ISBN   978-1-317-40920-5.
  6. Cloud, John (16 August 2007). "Are We Failing Our Geniuses?" Time .