Why should schools use accelerated progression with gifted students?
In considering the place of academic acceleration in the education of intellectually gifted children, it is helpful to review three basic premises of learning. Premise #1: Learning is a sequential, developmental process. Attainment of skills, understanding in different domains of knowledge, and strategies for solving problems, are all acquired gradually, and in sequences that are more or less predictable (Robinson, 1983). The stages of speech acquisition, for example, are fairly predictable. In general, the child first uses single words, then links them into pairs, then develops phrases, and finally speaks in sentences. Intellectually gifted children often seem to “skip” stages – the child’s “first words” may be a lengthy phrase or a complete sentence (Robinson, 1987; Gross, 1993) – but the stages are seldom reversed. Premise #2: There are substantial differences in learning status and learning rates among individuals of any given age. Individual differences characterize both the rate
