This paper reviews the school histories of five extremely gifted children, of IQ 160-200, who have been radically accelerated. Prior to their acceleration, the children were retained in the regular classroom in a lockstep curriculum based on their chronological age and grade placement. They suffered sever intellectual frustration, boredom, lack of motivation, and social rejection by age-peers, and displayed significantly lowered levels of social self-esteem. A combination of grade-skipping and radical subject matter acceleration has given the children access to curricula commensurate with their academic achievement levels and the intellectual and social companionship of children who share their abilities and interest. The young accelerands are more productive social relationships, and display healthier levels of social self-esteem than do equally gifted children who have been retained with age-peers of average ability.

Someone has said that genius is of necessity solitary, since the population is so sparse at the higher levels of mental ability. However, adult genius is mobile and can seek out its own kind. It is in the case of the child with extraordinarily high IQ that the social problem is most acute. If the IQ is 180, the intellectual level at 6 is almost on a par with the average 11-year-old, and at 10 or 11 is not far from that of the average high-school graduate. The inevitable result is that the child of IQ 180 has one of the most difficult problems of social adjustment that any human being is ever called upon to meet. " Burks, Jensen, and Terman (1930, p. 264)

It is ironic that although the research of Terman and his colleagues is rightly credited with refuting the myth that intellectual giftedness is linked to nervous instability and emotional maladjustment (Tannenbaum, 1983; Grinder, 1985), the education community has largely ignored their associated warning that extraordinarily gifted young people are nonetheless at serious risk of social isolation and rejection by age-peers.

In a comprehensive review of the research on the psychosocial development of the intellectually gifted, Janos and Robinson (1985) showed that the research findings most often referenced regarding favorable social adjustment emanate from studies of moderately gifted children. The few studies which have investigated the social and emotional development of the extremely gifted suggest that exceptionally gifted (IQ 160-179} and profoundly gifted (IQ 180+} children tend to have greater problems of social acceptance (Hollingworth, 1942; Gallagher, 1958; DeHaan & Havighurst, 1961; Barbe, 1964; Janos, 1983}.

Hollingworth (1926} defined the IQ range 125-155 as "socially optimal intelligence." She found that children scoring within this range were well-balanced, confident and socially effective individuals. She claimed, however, that above the level of IQ 160 the difference between exceptionally gifted children and their age-mates is so great that it leads to special problems of development which are correlated with social isolation.

Research both in the United States and in Australia has noted the decrease in motivation among extremely gifted children confined to the regular classroom (Janos, 1983; Silverman, 1989; Gross, 1989a) After many years of studying the extremely gifted, Hollingworth became convinced that enrichment alone was not a sufficient response to their academic and social needs.

Putting the Research to Use
Exceptionally gifted children appear in the population at a ratio of fewer than 1 in 10,000. Research has repeatedly found that these children differ quite significantly from moderately gifted age-peers on many cognitive and affective variables. Because of this, it is not enough to place them in part-time programs, such as resource room or pull-out, which are designed for moderately gifted students; they require full-time grouping with children closer to their own mental age and levels of socio-affective development. Research suggests that exceptionally and profoundly gifted students are best served by a program of radical acceleration incorporating a number of grade-skips appropriately spaced through the student's school career, supplemented with subject acceleration where it is required. It is important that the student is also provided with lateral enrichment at each stage. Radical acceleration provides the extremely gifted child with the intellectual and social companionship of children at similar stages of cognitive and affective development. Exceptionally gifted children retained with age-peers, or accelerated by only one year, are at serious risk of peer rejection and social isolation.

She became a persuasive advocate of full-time, self-contained classes for exceptionally gifted children (Hollingworth, 1926, 1936, 1942; Hollingworth & Cobb et al.,1923; Hollingworth & Cobb, 1928). Terman and Oden (1947) argued forcefully that for extremely gifted children the more conservative accelerative procedures, such as a single grade-skip, are not sufficient; they advised radical acceleration through several grade-skips spaced appropriately throughout the student's school career.

These recommendations were strongly supported by the subsequent research of Sheldon (1959), Janos (1983), and Silverman (1989) which suggested that the social isolation experienced by exceptionally gifted children is not the clinical isolation of emotional disturbance, but rather a condition imposed on the child by the absence of a peer group with whom to relate. When extremely gifted children who have been socially rejected by age-peers are removed from the inappropriate grade placement and placed with intellectual peers, the social difficulties disappear (Hollingworth, 1942; Silverman, 1989).

The present study
Since the early 1980s I have conducted a longitudinal study of the intellectual, academic, social, and emotional development of 40 children who have scored IQ 160 or above on the Stanford- Binet Intelligence Scale (L-M). The children live in six of the eight states of Australia and are presently aged between 6 and 16. This study has followed the children's development over several years and will continue until the youngest child graduates from high school. Aspects of the children's academic and psychosocial development have already been reported (Gross, 1989b, 1990; Gross & Feldhusen, 1990; Gross & Start, 1991; Gross, in press), and the early years of the study were reported in depth in my doctoral dissertation (Gross, 1989a).

The study employs a wide range of qualitative and quantitative observation techniques, triangulated to increase the validity and reliability of the study (Kidder & Fine, 1987). The children take standardized tests of achievement in several academic subject areas, and their tested levels of achievement are compared with the levels of work they are permitted to undertake in class. This enables the researcher to judge the degree of "fit" between the children's demonstrated achievement and the programs provided for them by their schools. In addition, since Australian schools generally communicate with the parents of students through written reports on the child's academic progress, the children's school reports from different grade levels are examined to analyze their teachers' perceptions of their levels of ability and achievement.

Many educators and psychologists studying the gifted and talented have emphasized the significance of a positive self-concept in the realization of intellectual potential (Hollingworth, 1926; Carroll, 1940; DeHaan & Havighurst, 1961; Feldhusen & Hoover, 1986). Self-esteem, an affective aspect of self-concept, is largely derived from the positive or negative feedback individuals receive from significant others about the value or effectiveness of their actions (Foster, 1983). Particularly in a society such as Australia, where the highly egalitarian social ethos is based, in large part, on "cutting down the tall poppies" (Ward, 1958; Goldberg, 1981; Start, 1986), there is the danger that extremely gifted students will receive deliberately misleading feedback about their abilities and potential not only from classmates but also from teachers. The Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory (SEI) is used in this study to measure the children's general self-esteem and their self-esteem in social relationships, relationships with family, and in their academic work.

Surveys of the reading interests of extremely gifted children reveal that they often read, with full comprehension and enjoyment, literature written for young people 5-7 years older (Burks, Jensen, & Terman, 1930; Hollingworth, 1942; Gross, 1989a). At 2-year intervals, surveys are made of the hours each child spends daily in voluntary reading over a 21-day period; the title, author, and subject classification of all materials read; the books which the children class as current favorites; and their reasons for preferring these particular books. Regular surveys are also made, over several weeks, of the nature and extent of television viewing, computer usage, hobbies and play interests, and interest in or participation in sports.

Developmental and demographic data have been acquired from many sources including questionnaires, medical records, parent diaries, and family documents. Semi structured interviews are held, at regular intervals, with the parents of each child and with the children themselves. These interviews follow up, clarify, and expand on the material gathered through the questionnaires, the achievement and personality testing, the school reports, and all other sources of information. The interviews also elicit the parents' opinions on more sensitive issues, such as the children's educational program, their relationships with teachers and classmates, and their social and emotional development. Similarly, the student interviews illicit the children's own views on their progress at school, their feelings about their school experiences, their social relationships, and their perceptions of themselves and their own abilities.

Of the 40 children in this study, a minority has been recognized by their schools as being young people of truly remarkable intellectual potential. In the considerable majority of cases, however, the children's teachers have remained unaware of their extraordinary intellectual potential or, where psychometric evidence of this has been made available, the school has refused, on ideological grounds, to develop any form of differentiated curriculum for the gifted child (Gross, 1989a). The majority of the extremely gifted children in this study have spent, or are spending, their elementary school years working through a lockstep curriculum in a heterogeneous classroom without access to other gifted, even moderately gifted, students.

However, 9 of the 40 children in this study have been radically accelerated and are undertaking part or all of their schooling with students 3 years older. This paper reports on the school histories of 5 of these children and discusses the factors that have contributed to the success of the individualized programs. The names by which the children and their families are identified in this paper are pseudonyms chosen by the children themselves.

It should be noted that the Australian school system is based on the British system. Accordingly, Australian children enter preschool or kindergarten at age 4, and formal schooling at age 5, one year earlier than their American counterparts.

Ian Baker
Ian Baker taught himself to read, write, and count before the age of 2. At age 4, he was assisting his kindergarten teacher by reading stories to the other children. By the time he entered school at age 5, he was reading, with great enjoyment, E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. He took an equal delight in mathematical problem solving, having taught himself to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. The teacher's response to Ian's remarkable abilities was to place him, along with the other 5-year-olds, in a reading readiness program and a math program which involved recognizing the numbers 1 through 10. Six months into his first year at school Ian's parents were called for an emergency conference with the school vice-principal, who informed them that the school wished to have Ian psychometrically tested as a preliminary to referring him to a special school for behaviorally disturbed children. According to the vice-principal, Ian had become uncontrollable in class and was displaying frightening bouts of physical violence toward other children. The school psychologist assessed Ian on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (L-M) as having an IQ of 170+. On a standardized test of reading achievement, the Neale Analysis of Reading, he was found to have reading accuracy and comprehension ages of 12. He was just over 5 years old.

The psychologist was appalled at the school's mismanagement of Ian's education and informed the principal that the child's behavioral difficulties arose not from emotional disturbance but from severe intellectual and social frustration. He advised the school that Ian desperately required an educational program adapted to his needs and regular access to other intellectually gifted students. For a short time, the school made curricular adaptations for Ian. He was permitted to do Grade 7 math (but without leaving his Grade 1 classroom) and a small pull-out program was established. His intellectual frustration abated somewhat and his behavior improved. However, the appointment of a new building principal, whose extremely egalitarian ideological views precluded any special provision for the gifted, ended the pull-out program and put Ian back into a lock-step curriculum based on his chronological age and grade placement rather than his mental age and levels of achievement. This led to astonishing mismatches between Ian' s levels of tested achievement and the curriculum prescribed for him.

At the age of 9, while in Grade 4, Ian took the Scholastic Aptitude Test-Mathematics (SAT-M) as part of the data collection procedures for this study. He made a scaled score of 560, .6 of a standard deviation above the mean, on this test standardized on 17-and 18-year-old American students planning to enter college. Meanwhile, in his Grade 4 classroom, Ian was required to work lock-step with his 9-year-old classmates on Grade 4 math. The antisocial behaviors returned, together with psychosomatic disturbances such as migraines, bouts of nausea, and abdominal cramps. The mornings became a battle to get Ian "well enough " and subdued enough to go to school. At the age of 9 years 3 months, Ian was again assessed on the Stanford-Binet (L-M). On this occasion, he achieved a mental age of 18 years 6 months. Psychologists with a special interest in the profoundly gifted advocate that, in cases such as this, when the child scores significantly beyond the ceiling of even the Stanford-Binet, a ratio IQ should be computed (Silverman & Kearney, 1989). A ratio computation places Ian's IQ at approximately 200.

At the end of Ian's Grade 4 year, his parents withdrew him from this state (government) elementary school and enrolled him in an independent (private) school whose principal has a special interest in the gifted and talented. Here, Ian has been permitted to flourish. He has an individualized program that incorporates radical subject matter acceleration, grade-skipping, "relevant academic enrichment" (Stanley, 1979), and mentorship. In 1991, aged 11, he was based in Grade 8 with 13-year-olds, but took math and computer science with 11th grade, and science, history, and geography with 10th graders. He is popular with his teachers and warmly accepted by the other students, and he is beginning to accept that although he is different, this need not prove a barrier to warm and supportive social relationships, as it did when he was isolated from intellectual peers in the regular classroom. He enjoys his accelerated and enriched curriculum and is thinking of taking some university math courses in 2 or 3 years.

Christopher Otway
Christopher, currently aged 14, is, like Ian, a profoundly gifted young man. Tested on the Stanford-Binet (L-M) at the age of 10 years 11 months, he achieved a mental age of 22 years, and thus a ratio IQ of approximately 200. At the age of 11 years 4 months, he achieved the remarkable score of 710 on the SAT-M.

From his earliest years Chris displayed prodigious talent in math and language. He taught himself to read at 2 years of age, and by age 4 he was reading children's encyclopedias and had acquired a level of general knowledge that would be unmatched by the majority of Grade 5 or 6 students. His math ability developed almost as precociously. Shortly after his 3rd birthday he spontaneously began to devise simple addition and subtraction sums, and by the time he entered kindergarten at the usual age of 4, he was capable of working at Grade 4 level in math. A psychometric assessment established that shortly after his 4th birthday, Chris had a mental age of at least 7.

In contrast to the debacle which greeted Ian Baker's arrival in school, the principal and teachers of Chris's primary school recognized his remarkable abilities within a few days of his enrollment and were willing to ensure that he received an appropriate education. Chris's parents had studied the literature on giftedness and were aware of the educational and psychosocial benefits of acceleration. Accordingly, they suggested to the building principal that Chris might be a suitable candidate for subject matter acceleration or grade-skipping, and the principal, after some thought, agreed to the experiment. By a fortunate chance he had visited Stanley and Benbow of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth at Johns Hopkins University while on study leave and was aware of the advantages of acceleration.

At first, Chris was withdrawn from his Grade 1 class for a few hours each day to join Grade 2 for English and Grade 5 for math. It soon became evident, however, that even this intervention did not address the full extent of Chris's advancement, and the following year, as a Grade 2 student, he attended the Grade 7 class each day for math. At the end of this year Chris was permitted to skip directly into Grade 4, and his subject matter acceleration continued, with Chris attending 8th grade for math and starting flute lessons with his 8th grade classmates in recognition of his obvious aptitude for music. Several of the highly gifted young mathematicians in this Australian study also display high levels of musical precocity (Gross, 1990).

Christopher's program of grade-skipping and subject acceleration has been extremely successful. At the age of 12 he was based in Grade 9 with students 2 and 3 years older but took physics, chemistry, English, math, and economics with the 11th grade classes. He entered Grade 10 in 1990, a few weeks after his 13th birthday, but rather than accelerate to Grade 12 for individual subjects, he himself chose to "repeat" Grade 11 in different curriculum areas, this time taking humanities and foreign language subjects. He plans to "repeat" Grade 12 in the same way. By the time he completes the final grade of high school at age 15 (rather than the usual age of 18), he will have undertaken a remarkable range of subjects from which he can choose those he will study at university.

It is of concern, however, that despite being permitted both acceleration and enrichment in English, Chris still had an unrealistically low perception of his abilities in this subject. Tested on the SAT-Vat the age of 11 years 4 months, he was astonished by his score of 580 and requested that the test be rescored. "I couldn't have done as well as that, " he told me in genuine concern. "The teachers reckon I'm just average in English." It is disturbing to note that many of the children in this study have received extremely inaccurate and negative feedback from their class teachers about their abilities and achievement levels.

Roshni Singh
Roshni Singh, aged 7, has a Stanford-Binet IQ of 162. Sarah, Roshni's mother, is Australian. Juspreet, her father, is of the Sikh religion and was born in Singapore. Roshni is a delicately beautiful child with dark, expressive eyes which are alive with intelligence. She is intensely aware of her identity as a "Punjabi person " and her adherence to the Sikh faith. Roshni was reading at age 3, and by 4 was writing letters to her relatives in Singapore on the family's personal computer. At 5 years 5 months old, she scored at the 84th percentile for 8-year-olds on the Leicester Number Test, a standardized test of math achievement commonly used in Britain and Australia.

Roshni's exceptional abilities were recognized in early childhood and she was permitted early entrance to kindergarten at the age of 3, and to primary school at the age of 4, on the grounds of her accelerated reading capacities. Yet neither the kindergarten nor the school was at first prepared to modify the curriculum in response to the very talents which had prompted them to offer her early entrance. Despite being able to read as well as the average second grader, Roshni was presented by the kindergarten with large cut-out letters as an introduction to the alphabet. Picture books were freely available, but no books with printed text. Not surprisingly, Roshni stopped reading. She was receiving from the kindergarten the unequivocal message that 3-and 4-year-olds were not supposed to read and that to do so was somehow "wrong." So, to conform to her teacher's wishes and her classmates' expectations, she did her best to pretend to be a "normal" 3-year-old. With tact, loving encouragement, and a great deal of patience, Sarah and Juspreet were able to reassure Roshni that she should not be ashamed of her reading capacity, and after a few weeks she began to read again. The following year, however, when Roshni entered formal schooling, the pattern was repeated. She entered an environment in which all knowledge and learning was assumed to flow to the children through the teacher. The teacher believed that reading should be taught at age 5, not age 4, and was disturbed by Roshni's self-acceleration. Obediently, Roshni stopped reading again.

This time, the setback was more serious, and Roshni's deliberate underachievement became more difficult to reverse. She had no one in her class of 5-year-olds who shared her ability or interests, and she became very bored, lonely, and depressed. After some months of unsuccessful negotiation with Roshni's teacher, Sarah and Juspreet expressed their concern to the principal and asked whether, since the school seemed unwilling to extend her academically within the regular classroom, they might be willing to consider some form of acceleration. Fortunately, both the psychologist attached to the school and one of the primary school teachers knew something of gifted education, and the school somewhat reluctantly agreed. Roshni was permitted to move from the reception class into Grade 1 eight weeks before the end of the school year, and since this intervention was highly successful, she moved to Grade 2 with her new classmates at the start of the following year. She entered Grade 2 at the age of 5 years 4 months, fully 2 years younger than is customary.

At the time of writing Roshni has just passed her 7th birthday and is in Grade 4 with children 2 and 3 years her senior. The class is grouped by ability, and Roshni is in the top group in every subject. Nonetheless, Roshni admits that the math which she is doing is still considerably below her ability. However, she thoroughly enjoys school. She is liked by her teachers and extremely popular with her classmates. As noted earlier, most Australian schools send home regular written reports on the children's progress. On Roshni's most recent report, the principal wrote: "Roshni has applied herself diligently to all tasks and maintained her high position. She is very settled in her peer relationships despite the age difference, and this allows her to use the opportunities presented to develop and extend her own knowledge. I do enjoy Roshni's lively personality with her mischievous sense of humour! “

One disadvantage of Roshni's school program is that it includes little planned enrichment and no opportunity for work with other gifted children. In Roshni's Grade 2 year the school considered introducing a pull-out program for gifted students but this plan was abandoned for political reasons because of the school's fear of possible accusations of elitism and potential objections from parents of children not selected for the program. Roshni's parents are aware that acceleration by itself will not provide a balanced educational and social diet for their daughter, and they are investigating the possibility of transferring her to another school which will maintain her acceleration program and also facilitate her interaction with other gifted students.

Fred Campbell
Fred Campbell is a small, wiry, continuously alert young man with an eager, inquiring mind. Fred entered 11th grade 2 weeks after his 14th birthday. His school has combined grade-skipping, subject matter acceleration, and enrichment in an individualized program designed to foster Fred's exceptional abilities in math and science. Unfortunately, his elementary school was less concerned about his abilities.

Fred is an extremely able and multitalented student. He has a Stanford-Binet IQ of 163. At the age of 12 years 1 month he scored 640 on the SAT-M and 500 on the SAT-V (Verbal). He taught himself to read before his 3rd birthday and his remarkable math skills developed soon afterwards. He is, furthermore, a highly gifted artist.

Fred was bitterly unhappy in elementary school. Like many exceptionally gifted children, he read deeply in many fields, burying himself in a subject until he had exhausted the resources available, then moving on to another topic which he absorbed with equal enthusiasm. At the age of 9, he developed a keen interest in psychology and devoured adult texts in this discipline which he borrowed from libraries in the large city in which he lives. In his school, however, he was a social outcast, derided and rejected for being different. Fred's classmates could not understand his interest in psychology, philosophy, and music. They were unable to understand his passion for mathematics. His actions, reactions, and opinions, when he tried to express them, were utterly alien to their system of values. They taunted, derided, and attacked him mercilessly and made his life a misery. The school refused to offer Fred any form of differentiated curriculum. "He is a rather independent person who likes to be allowed to set his own goals and to take responsibility for his own learning, and this was not accepted at his elementary school," says Fred's mother, Eleanor. "Their attitude was that he should be like the other 9-year-olds, take more interest in sport, and work at the level of the class."

Finally, in desperation, during Fred's Grade 5 year, his parents approached the local high school (in most Australian states, high schools take children from Grade 7 through Grade 12) and asked the principal whether they would consider admitting Fred a year early. After meeting Fred, the principal agreed enthusiastically. Consequently, at age 10 Fred entered 7th grade, an immediate grade-skip of one year, and the following year he was based in Grade 8 but took math and chemistry with Grade 11. This program proved so successful that he was next permitted to skip Grade 9 while continuing his subject acceleration in math, science, and computing. Both academically and socially, acceleration is, in Fred's own words, "the best thing that has ever happened to me. " For the first time he was able to associate with children whose ways of thinking and viewing the world were like his own. His classmates, who are 2 and 3 years older than he, accept him as one of them, and he has made a number of warm and continuing friendships.

Hadley Bond
Hadley Bond is 9 years old, is in 7th grade, and has a Stanford-Binet ratio IQ of 178. His phenomenal mathematical ability was evident from very early childhood. At 18 months of age he was already fascinated by the math drill programs used by his two older brothers on the family's home computer. He delighted in simple addition problems. He would work out the answer to a question using plastic beads, and type it into the computer, laughing with pleasure when the response was verified. He was reading small books before the age of two, and at 3 he had the reading skills of a child of 8.

Like Roshni, Hadley was permitted early entrance to school on the basis of his remarkable abilities in math and language, which had been identified and assessed in preschool. Unfortunately, Hadley's school was similarly unwilling to adapt the curriculum to his needs. Three years after teaching himself to add and subtract, Hadley, along with the other 5-year-olds, was being invited to place in order the numbers 1-10. Hadley was bored and resentful, and announced frankly to his parents that school was a waste of time. Concerned that such a negative experience, if it continued, might leave the child with a lasting dislike for school, his parents removed him. A few months later, at the "proper" age, they enrolled him in a different school a few miles away. The principal of this second school recognized Hadley's remarkable abilities and placed him in Grade 1, an immediate grade-skip of 12 months.

Extremely gifted children often realize at a very early age that their abilities and interests differ radically from those of other children, and they may come to blame or denigrate themselves for being out of step (Hollingworth, 1926; Gross, 1989a). At his second school Hadley took care to disguise, as much as possible, the fact that he was "different" from other 5-year-olds. He carefully modeled his behavior on his classmates, even mimicking them by selecting, from the classroom bookshelves, picture books or books with only a few words of text. Despite the psychologist's assessment which placed his full-scale IQ on the WPPSI at 150, the classroom teacher took his reading performance at face value, and some months passed before the school recognized and responded to his exceptional reading abilities. Fortunately, subject matter acceleration formed part of this response, and Hadley was permitted to go to Grade 2 for math and Grade 3 for computer instruction.

Hadley responded much more positively to acceleration than he had to the attempts at individualized instruction and in-class enrichment which the school had tried initially. He was much happier in his relations with the Grade 3 students with whom he worked in computer class than with his own classmates who were only 12 months older than he. Accordingly, at the end of Grade 1, Hadley was advanced into Grade 3, to be with children 2 years his senior. "It was a social wonderland for Hadley," says his mother. "For the first time he was fully accepted by the other children in his grade and he made lots of good friends. It was then that he started to talk about how bad the previous years had been and how lonely and isolated he had felt" (Gross, in press). Hadley's new-found happiness led to a surge in his motivation to achieve, and at the end of his Grade 4 year the principal, Hadley, and his parents decided that he should skip directly to Grade 6. This grade-skip, like the previous two, proved extremely successful, and at the start of 1991 Hadley, aged 9, moved with his 12-year- old classmates into Grade 7. To his surprise and delight he topped his class of 125 students in the math placement test.

Examples of inappropriate educational provision
Of the 40 exceptionally and profoundly gifted children in this study, 31 have been retained in the regular classroom or have been offered token grade-skips of one year. The school programs of several of these children are text- book cases of educational mismanagement.

At age 4, Richard amazed a professor of mathematics at a major Australian university by doing arithmetic mentally in binary, octal, and hexadecimal. At the age of 12 years 6 months, he scored 780 on the SAT-M. He is a gifted musician and composer and has won two state-wide elementary school chess championships. Throughout his school career, Richard has been retained with age-peers both in math and in all other school subjects.

Anastasia has a Stanford-Binet ratio IQ of 173. At age 6, her favorite out-of-school reading was National Geographic. Aged 7, she was reading Richard Adams' Watership Down. At age 8 she read an English translation of Les Miserables; having seen the show, she wanted to read the book. Anastasia has been grade-skipped by one year. It is doubtful whether placing an 8-year-old who reads adult novels with 9-year-olds would provide anything more than a temporary alleviation of her boredom and social isolation.

Adam, IQ 162, was a competent and enthusiastic reader by the age of 3. He spent his earliest years of schooling in a small country school where the first three grades were contained in the same classroom. His teacher, who stated that he was the brightest child she had encountered in her teaching career, permitted him to complete the work of the three grades in 18 months. At 6 years 10 months, he was reading Charles Kingsley's classic, The Water Babies and his reading accuracy and comprehension were assessed at Grade 7 level.

The building principal, however, shared the concern of many school administrators that acceleration would lead to social or emotional damage (Southern, Jones, & Fiscus, 1989). Adam's accelerated progress was halted, and his 3rd grade teacher insisted that he read, and study, the same materials as the other students. This necessitated him repeating much of the work he had already covered in previous grades. Adam's consequent boredom, depression, and intellectual frustration manifested itself both at school and at home. His teachers reported him as arrogant, disruptive, and unmannerly. At home, he was aggressive and short-tempered. However, as the year progressed, he lost even the will to rebel. He began to conform to the requirements of his teachers and the academic standards of his classmates. His teachers were delighted with the "improvement" in Adam's behavior and expressed their approval to his parents. Halfway through the school year, Adam's father expressed his fears in a letter to the author.

What I find it hard to tell them, because I can't define it, is that he has lost, or rather is no longer able to display, the "spark" that he always had. This was the sharpness; the quick, often humorous, comment; the sudden bubbling over of enthusiasm when he starts following through a series of ideas. It is rather like a stone with many sharp edges; they have knocked these edges off and as a result he is rolling more smoothly in class and they are happy about that. I feel that they have caused him to bury an important part of himself. It is still there; it bursts out at home now and again, but he has learned to keep it hidden. I hope you know what I mean, because I have tried to explain it to the teachers and I fail every time. They believe they have had great success, but I know they are depressing some vital spark. (Gross, 1989a, p. 228)

Factors in the Success of the Acceleration Programs Program design and planning
Nine of the 40 children in this study have been radically accelerated. In each case the grade-skips and subject matter acceleration have been carefully planned and monitored, addressing the children's social and emotional maturity as well as their academic achievement. No child has skipped more than one grade at a time; as recommended by Terman and Oden (1947), the skips have been spaced appropriately as the child progressed through school, with at least one year of consolidation between each skip. As advised by Feldhusen, Proctor, and Black (1986) in their guidelines for grade advancement of precocious children, each student was psychometrically assessed to establish his or her intellectual capacity and to ensure that the child would be able to perform at a level considerably beyond the average for the receiving grade. In each case, it was understood that acceleration would be undertaken on a trial basis, and the children knew that they had the option, at any time, to return to their earlier placement. In every case, however, the acceleration has proven overwhelmingly successful.

In each instance the children's parents and the children themselves were involved in the planning and monitoring of the acceleration program. Indeed in the majority of cases the initial grade-skip was proposed not by the teachers but by the parents who had familiarized themselves with the research literature on appropriate educational provision for the gifted. In several cases the school was extremely reluctant to permit any form of acceleration and concurred only when it had become obvious that retaining the child with age-peers, with a token provision of in-class enrichment or pull-out, was proving quite inadequate to the child's academic and social needs (Gross, 1989a).

The relative merits of acceleration and enrichment have been much debated. Many researchers (Goldberg, Passow, Camm, & Neill, 1966; Sisk, 1979; Feldhusen, 1983) conclude that the most effective intervention structure for highly gifted students is a combination of both procedures enhanced by other provisions such as individual study and mentorships. With the exception of Roshni, the children's acceleration has been supplemented with enrichment and ability grouping in the form of pull-out programs, mentorships, or tracking in academic subjects. Further extension has been provided for Chris and Ian by permitting them to enter state and national math competitions at ages much younger than is usually permitted. Even with radical acceleration, the mental ages of these children are still considerably higher than the average student in the classes they have entered, and additional educational adaptations have been necessary to ensure that they are, indeed, provided with academic challenge and intellectual peers.

Enhancement of social self-esteem
The Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory, used to measure the self-esteem of the children in this study, consists of four subscales, each measuring a different aspect of self-esteem: these are social self-peers, home-parents, school-academic, and general self (Coopersmith, 1981). Marked contrasts appear between the academic and social self-concept scores of the radical accelerands and the other students.

It might be anticipated that exceptionally gifted children who have been radically accelerated would score highly on the index of academic self-esteem. By contrast, they display positive but modest scores, between the mean for their age groups and. 7 of a standard deviation above. These students compare their academic performance with that of their classmates who are several years their senior. They still outperform their classmates and they enjoy the intellectual and academic challenge, but they have to work to achieve their success. These results contradict the popular belief that children who have been accelerated will become conceited about their academic ability.

Interestingly, it is the children who have not been radically accelerated whose academic self-esteem is unusually inflated. The schoolwork presented to these exceptionally gifted children demands little effort, their performance is generally far beyond that of their classmates, and they have no contact with other children whose achievement levels approach their own and with whom they could realistically compare themselves.

In this study, as in previous studies of the extremely gifted (Hollingworth, 1942; DeHaan & Havighurst, 1961; Janos, 1983), the majority of children retained in the regular classroom have experienced extreme difficulty in establishing positive social relationships with their classmates. The strongly negative perceptions which they develop both of their own social skills and of their image in the eyes of other children are reflected in extremely low levels of social self-esteem. Over half the children in the study have social self-esteem scores at least one standard deviation below the mean. The social self-esteem scores of Anastasia and Richard, expressed in z-scores, are -2.59 and -1.14 respectively. Ian Baker's social self-esteem z-score, before being permitted early entrance to high school, was a disturbingly low -1.97.

Significantly, the only children scoring more than one standard deviation above the mean on the social self-peers subscale of the SEI are children who have been radically accelerated. These young people are able to work and socialize with other children who share, or can at least empathize with, their interests, their delight in intellectual enquiry, and their ways of viewing the world. These children are confident in their relationships with classmates. They are enjoying the social pleasures of childhood while, at the same time, experiencing the intellectual satisfaction of challenging academic work.

Provision of an intellectual peer group
It is now generally understood and accepted that a child's level of social and emotional development is more highly correlated with his mental age than with his chronological age (Hallahan & Kauffman, 1982; Tannenbaum, 1983; Janos & Robinson, 1985). The significance of this is immense when dealing with the extremely gifted since the higher the IQ, the greater the discrepancy between chronological and mental age, and thus the wider the gap between the psychosocial development of the gifted child and that of his age-peers. Children tend to make friendship choices on the basis of mental, rather than chronological age (Hubbard, 1929; O'Shea, 1960), and researchers over the last 60 years have noted that, as a rule, intellectually gifted children seek out, as preferred companions, children somewhat older than themselves (Davis, 1924; Terman, 1926; Hollingworth, 1931; Janos & Robinson, 1985). Christopher, Ian, Fred, and the other radical accelerands in this study have been given access to a group of children who are at similar stages of intellectual and emotional development.

Extremely gifted children may be hampered in socialization by the fact that their reading interests and preferred leisure activities tend to lie completely outside the realm of capability or interest of the average child (Zorbaugh & Boardman, 1936; Hollingworth, 1942; Gross, 1989b). This can lead to severe problems of salience and possible social rejection should the extremely gifted child try to share his reading interests with age peers. Few 8-year-olds choose, like Anastasia, to read Les Miserables. Fred, aged 9 and in Grade 4, had no access to friends who would understand his passionate interest in psychology and the history of art. By contrast, Hadley, also aged 9 but in Grade 7, has teenage classmates who share his enjoyment of science fantasy; the novels he prefers would be completely above the heads of his age-peers. Christopher, who at age 12 was enthralled by Dickens and the Brontes, could share his enthusiasm with his 11th grade classmates.

The common perception of the extremely gifted as eager, academically successful young people who display high levels of task commitment has been refuted by research which demonstrates that many highly gifted children underachieve seriously in the regular classroom, and that, by the end of elementary school, many have almost completely lost the motivation to excel (Pringle, 1970; Painter, 1976; Whitmore, 1980; Gross & Feldhusen, 1990).

The majority of the extremely gifted young people in this study state frankly that for substantial periods in their school career they have deliberately concealed their abilities or significantly moderated their scholastic achievement in an attempt to reduce their classmates' and teachers' resentment of them. Generally, the radical accelerands admit that even the considerably advanced curriculum they are now offered does not challenge their intellectual abilities to the fullest; however, they state uniformly that the emotional security they now experience through being placed with intellectual peers has alleviated or completely removed the pressure to underachieve for social acceptance.

There may, however, be a temporal limit to the reversibility of underachievement. Attempts to reverse academic underachievement in gifted high school students who have been working significantly below their potential for several years meet with variable success (Tannenbaum, 1983). Ian Baker's father recognizes how close Ian came to losing, perhaps irretrievably, his motivation to learn. "He has had to start all over again and learn to work in school, " wrote Brock when Ian was first permitted radical subject acceleration in math. "It's years since he had to think about anything that was presented to him in class, and it has come as quite a shock to him to have to apply himself. At first, he even resented it. However, his attitude towards school has definitely improved. A few times in the last few weeks he has come home with the gleam in his eye that we remember from when he was little. Only now have we realized how much he had turned off. I think we've arrested the slide, but I also think we went very close to him switching off altogether. "

The exceptionally gifted children who have not been permitted radical acceleration are not so fortunate. In almost every case, the parents of children retained in the regular classroom with age-peers or grade-skipped by only 12 months report, like the parents of Adam, that the drive to achieve, the delight in intellectual exploration and the joyful seeking after new knowledge which had characterized their children in the early years has seriously diminished or disappeared completely. Unfortunately, rather than investigating the cause of this, the schools attended by these children have tended to view their decreased motivation, with the attendant drop in academic attainment, as indicators that the child has" leveled out" and is no longer gifted.

Summary
The study reported here is the only longitudinal study of exceptionally or profoundly gifted children conducted outside the United States. The findings support the conclusions of American researchers such as Stanley and Benbow (1983), Pollins (1983), and Janos et al. (1988) that radical acceleration is a practical and effective response to the intellectual and psychosocial needs of the extremely gifted.

In every case, the students who have been radically accelerated, and their teachers and parents, believe strongly that they are now much more appropriately placed, both academically and socially. These students display higher levels of motivation, they report that pressure to underachieve for peer acceptance has significantly diminished or disappeared completely, and, although the curriculum which they are offered does not completely address their academic needs, it provides a challenging and stimulating intellectual environment when enhanced I with ability grouping, enrichment, or mentoring. The radical accelerands have positive attitudes toward school and believe that they are warmly regarded by their teachers. They have a greater number of friends and enjoy closer and more productive social relationships than they did prior to their acceleration. They have significantly higher levels of social and general self-esteem than do children of equal intellectual ability who have been retained with age-peers or grade-skipped by a single year.

Prior to their acceleration, many of the accelerands displayed the negative attitudes and behaviors which still characterize the extremely gifted students who have not been radically accelerated. These children display disturbingly low levels of motivation and social self-esteem, are more likely to report social rejection by their classmates, and state that they frequently underachieve in attempts to gain acceptance by age-peers and teachers. Several of these children are required to work, in class, at levels 7 or more years below their tested achievement.

In Australia, as in the United States, many teachers argue that acceleration may jeopardize the child's social and emotional development. This study finds no evidence to suggest that social or emotional problems arise through well-planned and carefully monitored programs of radical acceleration and suggests that we should concern ourselves rather with the maladjusting effects of prolonged educational misplacement. Accelerating exceptionally or profoundly gifted children by a single year is no more effective than retaining them in the regular classroom with age-peers.

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