It’s commonly believed by Americans that allowing students to skip grades is unhealthy for their social and emotional development.
However, an article in this month’s Scientific American suggests the opposite.
The article describes the work of the “Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth” (SMPY), which over the past 45 years has identified 5,000 gifted individuals and tracked their careers. As the article explains, the SMPY has founded that allowing gifted students to skip grades has benefitted them both intellectual and socially:
“The SMPY data supported the idea of accelerating fast learners by allowing them to skip school grades. In a comparison of children who bypassed a grade with a control group of similarly smart children who didn’t, the grade-skippers were 60% more likely to earn doctorates or patents and more than twice as likely to get a PhD in a STEM field. Acceleration is common in SMPY’s elite 1-in-10,000 cohort, whose intellectual diversity and rapid pace of learning make them among the most challenging to educate. Advancing these students costs little or nothing, and in some cases may save schools money, says Lubinski. ‘These kids often don’t need anything innovative or novel,’ he says, ‘they just need earlier access to what’s already available to older kids.’
Many educators and parents continue to believe that acceleration is bad for children—that it will hurt them socially, push them out of childhood or create knowledge gaps. But education researchers generally agree that acceleration benefits the vast majority of gifted children socially and emotionally, as well as academically and professionally.”
I’m glad to hear a bit of pushback from the academic community on the popular notion that children of varying intellectual abilities should be kept together purely based on when they were born. Personally, I think segregating students by age is moronic. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of education—imported from Prussia to America in the mid-19th century—and I think it’s safe to say that the idea has been tried and found wanting. It assumes a uniform process of intellectual development that simply doesn’t exist in reality, and I believe keeping younger and older children away from each other actually stunts everyone’s maturity.
I sometimes wonder if I would have benefitted from skipping a grade or two. By no means do I consider myself a genius. The description I usually give of myself—which I stole from my college professor John Boyle—is “average bright.”
What I do know is that—perhaps like many of you—I spent most of my time during primary education being bored. In kindergarten I was the only student who could read, and the teacher would put me in a corner by myself to read books during many of the lessons. Grade school was mainly spent enduring the belaboring of concepts I already knew or was able to learn more quickly than most of the students. Largely because of the lack of challenging material, my intellectual curiosity waned, only to be revived when I enrolled in a more rigorous high school.
Would you support getting rid of age segregation in schools? Do you think you would have benefitted from being able to advance more quickly through school?
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1 Comment
Mary Ann Sadar
September 10, 2022, 2:15 amMy two girls were accelerated by one year, one of them by starting a year early, and the other by taking first semester of second grad and second semester of third. Both of these were suggested by the school personnel. The girls flourished, although girl number two was quickly back up to the top of her class, and she did miss a few concepts. I would not want them too far advanced because of their interactions with older boys. Daughter number two took AP Psychology and was the top of that class even though she was a sophomore and had to have special consent because of the subject matter. She scored in the top 1% on that AP exam. Then we had our son, who struggled more with his autistic tendencies than the girls did. We sent him to preschool to let him learn how to function in a class and to make friends. He often read to his classmates. We did not advance him in his grade level though he likely has the highest IQ of the trio, but he was advance in reading and skipped two grades of math in elementary school. That was in a Catholic school, but when we moved and he started at a public school they kept him advanced. That meant that for two years he had to bike to the junior high and back for his math classes. It was refreshing to have teachers and administration who were flexible in their ideas and time to make this happen. One teacher moved up a grade with my son because he knew how to plan his day to accomodate my son’s needs. How did they fare? Daughter number two, the youngest, was an outstanding student in high school and had significant leadership responsibilities. But her health caused her to drop out of college in the first semester. Daughter number one spent a lot of time in high school in a preprofessional ballet company and still dances now. She is working on her second master’s degree while working. My son graduated with highest honors from an Ivy, got married, started to work, then did during the recession did temp work. He realized he needed to go for his doctorate in physics, which he achieved while raising an increasingly large family. So the advancements we did worked for our kids. Our son was not advanced a grade so that he could compete athletically, which helped his social status. He was already among the youngest students in his year. He played baseball for the junior high and little league from age 5 to 16. The other thing which helped him a lot was the Academic Decathlon program. I highly recommend this because it requires speech and interview among its disciplines. It helped my son learn to communicate to a group, a great work skill, and to present himself well in able to get that job.
As for myself, I would have loved to advance because I was painfully bored. My husband could have been advanced. Instead he goofed off. But in my family I had a sister a year ahead of me. Jealousy was always an issue between us, so though it would have benefitted my brain, it could have ruined my relationship with my sister, which was more important. I would like to see ability used as a basis for grouping kids. There would still be differences between kids and maybe the older students could mentor younger ones socially. My daughter in law homeschools, and there it is easy to teach according to ability.
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