![]() Scott Peters, an associate education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and colleagues including Rambo-Hernandez, looked at the slowly growing trend to use district- or school-building-level comparison groups rather than national norms to identify academically advanced students while taking into account their local access to resources and challenging coursework. Yet districts rely on academic performance to identify gifted students, which can lead them to overlook students with disabilities and those from disadvantaged groups with less opportunity to learn. Better Identification?Īcademically gifted students aren’t just further ahead than their classmates research suggests they learn new concepts faster and differently. And as other studies at the meeting suggest, both identification and services can be spotty for academically gifted students. ![]() The growth study looked at top performers, whether or not they had been in gifted programs. “In theory, if you slow the kids down long enough, eventually the curriculum will catch up with them. Those who started out ahead didn’t outpace the average students’ growth during the school year until 4th grade in math and 5th grade in reading. Top-performing students in math were more likely to show higher growth during the school year than in the summer, but in both subjects top students grew significantly slower during the school year and faster during the summer than the average student. So there was a real question as to whether or not those students were benefiting at all from their time in school.” “In reading, the students who started at two standard deviations above the mean had much slower growth during the school year, and then they just kept trucking along with that same flow over the summer. “The farther you started from your school’s mean, the slower your growth,” Rambo-Hernandez said. The researchers compared students who tested at the mean in 3rd grade to those who tested about three grade levels ahead of that, and then followed both groups’ growth through 5th grade. Karen Rambo-Hernandez of West Virginia University and Matthew Makel of Duke looked at math and reading performance in 10 states that use the NWEA MAP computer-adaptive test in reading and mathematics. But a study previewed at the meeting found top-performing students show less flattening from school to summer in the elementary grades-and much slower growth during the school year than average-performing students. Slow Growthįor example: Prior studies have found most students experience a “summer slump,” growing faster during school years and flattening out over summers. “We don’t even have a common definition across states of what gifted education is.”Īcross several symposia at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting here, researchers added new wrinkles to the debate over how to academically support gifted students. has a federal mandate-you must meet these students’ needs-we don’t have that,” said Jill Adelson, a research scientist at Duke University’s Talent Identification Program and the editor of the journal Gifted Child Quarterly. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |