Gifted and Talented Students

What is acceleration?

Acceleration occurs when gifted students are not able to be motivated, engaged and challenged in their chronological age curriculum, classroom or even school.

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There are levels of giftedness which need to be addressed before acceleration occurs. As a teacher we need to ask ourselves - Can individual learning pathways and differentiated curriculum be sufficient enough for appropriate learning development or does acceleration need to occur?

A diagram of the levels of giftedness will enable teachers to grasp some idea of what level gifted students learn.

Who is the smartest of them all?

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(Education Queensland – The Learning Place, 2011)




There are three steps which can help teachers realise the natural progression of acceleration through a student’s ability and pace at which one learns: 

·         Curriculum compaction – streamline the regular curriculum

o       Pre-tests – prior knowledge

o       Alternative curriculum

·        
·         Subject acceleration

o       One or limited subject/s and advances a year or two

o       Online learning 

·         Year advancement

o       Skip a year, advance a year from their peer group

§         Suitability for years advancement

·         Assessment

·         Academic level

·         Social and emotional maturity

·         Students eagerness to advance

·         Receiving teacher

·         Trial period

·         Monitoring

·         Caution

·         Sound evidence for year advancement

(Education Queensland, n.d.)
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Typing on laptop sourced from Flickr images under creative commons licence
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Students on laptops sourced from Flickr images under creative commons licence
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(Education Queensland, n.d.)

There is a misconception / myth that acceleration will detriment gifted students’ social and emotional wellbeing. However, by keeping them back with their chronological age group can have just as detrimental side effects. They become disengaged and unmotivated and their will to learn can flounder. This in turn can lead to frustration and inappropriate behaviour among their peer group which deems them as being immature. Gifted students can benefit from accelerating in many ways, even socially and emotionally. It is stated, in the Core Module for Identifying gifted students, that “gifted students often prefer the companionship of older students” (Gross, 2004, p. 14) because they share the same interests.

There are consequences for not accelerating gifted students and “several of the non-accelerands have serious and ongoing relationship problems” (Gross, 2004, p. 48). This can have great effect on the rest of their learning lives and relationships at work or socially. If acceleration does not occur we are producing conforming thinkers who should follow the lead of their peers and disregard their own creative responses. Gifted students need to be motivated and intellectually challenged, acceleration can do that. As Terman suggests there is no such thing as “early ripen, early rot” (Gross, 2004, 40).