"For some, especially those outside the field of the education of the gifted, acceleration as an educational option is simply out of the question. These individuals seem to view the prospect of a child deviating from the one-grade-per-year lockstep not simply as a modification of a somewhat arbitrary administrative convenience, but rather as a contravention of the laws of nature."
-Borland, 1991, p. vii

"Their attitude seems to be that if God had wanted me to be in ninth grade, He would have had me born a year earlier:"
-Carol, highly gifted eighth grade girl, 1993

Borland's wry and perceptive comment, quoted above, is taken from his foreword to Southern and Jones' fine text The Academic Acceleration of Gifted Children (1991). As all three authors have frequently noted, the majority of educators outside the field of gifted education are extremely wary of the use of acceleration even with the most highly gifted students, and many teachers and building principals argue strongly against it.

Unhappily, the value of acceleration is by no means universally accepted even by educators within gifted education. Southern, Jones, and Fiscus (1989) noted that while coordinators of gifted programs held more positive attitudes toward acceleration than did teachers or school principals, they still viewed the process as potentially hazardous. Gross (in press) surveyed a group of 90 Australian teachers and school administrators entering specialized graduate study in gifted education, and compared these educators' attitudes toward various aspects of gifted education with the attitudes of teachers not in specialist study.

Not surprisingly, Gross found that teachers entering specialized training held much more positive attitudes towards gifted students and special provisions for the gifted than did their professional colleagues; however, their attitudes toward acceleration still displayed a considerable degree of ambivalence. Only when they were actually involved in training, when they had become familiar with many of the empirical research studies documenting the positive academic and social effects of acceleration, and when they had been able to meet and talk with gifted students who had been accelerated, did the teachers' attitudes toward acceleration begin to improve.

Southern, Jones and Fiscus (1989) listed four principle concerns of teachers regarding the possible maladaptive effects of acceleration on gifted students. Teachers feared that accelerated students would "(a) lose their academic advantage in later school years, (b) experience difficulties in social and emotional development as a result of being relatively young and mediocre in achievement compared to their older class-mates, (c) lack the physical and emotional maturity to handle the stress of acceleration, and (d) become arrogant or elitist in their attitudes toward others" (Southern, Jones & Fiscus, 1989, p. 29). Concerns expressed most frequently by teachers, however, related to the possibility of social or emotional damage resulting, in later childhood or in adulthood, for students who had been accelerated.

By contrast, as Southern and Jones (1991) and many other researchers have documented, the acceleration of gifted students is consistently associated with positive changes in their academic development and a readier social acceptance from mental age peers, with whom the accelerated student is placed, than chronological peers, by whom he or she was often rejected (Hollingworth, 1926; Terman & Oden, 1947; Pollins, 1983; Gross, 1993). Teachers who remain wary of, or opposed to, acceleration are often unaware of the research which demonstrates that children's social and emotional development is more highly correlated with mental age than with chronological age (Lehman and Erdwins, 1981; Hallahan and Kaufman, 1982; Janos and Robinson, 1985a). Gifted students are more likely to form positive and lasting friendships with older students, with whom they share a commonality of intellectual and psychosocial development, than with age-peers who are likely to be still at a stage of emotional development which the gifted student passed through some years before (O'Shea, 1960; Gross, 1989).

Exceptionally Gifted Students
Teachers who oppose early entry or grade-skipping on psychosocial grounds are likely to reject out of hand the proposal that for a minority of extremely gifted children (IQ 160+) a single grade-skip will be insufficient to meet their academic and social needs. Yet over the last 50 years, researchers tracing the intellectual and psychosocial development of exceptionally and profoundly gifted young people have consistently advised that these students are best served by a series of carefully planned and monitored grade-skips spaced over the course of the student's school career (Hollingworth, 1942; Terman and Oden, 1947; Silverman, 1989; Gross, 1992).

Extremely gifted students may benefit from entering college several years early. There is a considerable bank of research evidence which suggests that not only are the academic achievements of early college entrants superior to those of regular college students and equally gifted students who did not enter early (Janos & Robinson, 1985b; Brody, Assouline & Stanley, 1990), but also that the experience of early entrance has no negative effects on, but rather enhances, the social and emotional adjustment of accelerants (Brody & Benbow, 1987; Noble & Drummond, 1992).

Just as the properties of the normal curve of distribution dictate that there will be many more students of average ability than gifted students, so the moderately gifted will outnumber the highly gifted, and the highly gifted will considerably outnumber the exceptionally and profoundly gifted. Exceptionally gifted students (IQ 160-179) appear in the population at a ratio of fewer than 1 in 10,000, while fewer than 1 in 1 million students are profoundly gifted (IQ 180+).

Because moderately gifted students so greatly outnumber students at the higher levels of giftedness, the identification procedures which are generally recommended, and the programs which are developed for the gifted and talented, are generally based on the characteristics, learning styles and needs of the moderately gifted. Yet researchers have noted profound differences between moderately and exceptionally gifted students on almost every cognitive and affective variable studied (Gross, 1993). In terms of intellectual capacity alone, the profoundly gifted student of IQ 190 differs from moderately gifted classmates of 130 to an even greater degree than the latter differ from intellectually handicapped students of IQ 70. If they are to come anywhere near maximizing their remarkable intellectual or academic potential, exceptionally and profoundly gifted children require an educational program which differs significantly in structure, pace and content from that which might be offered to the moderately gifted.

For extremely gifted students, contact with intellectual peers, or at least with other students at the same developmental levels as themselves, becomes an urgent necessity. As far back as the late 1920s, Terman found that the subjects in his longitudinal study who had IQs in excess of 170 appeared more solitary than subjects with IQs in the 140-150 range (Burks, Jensen & Terman, 1930). Hollingworth was extremely aware of the social plight of profoundly gifted students, noting that children of IQ 180+ tended to be social isolates, not from choice but because it was almost impossible, in the regular school situation, for them to find children who shared their remarkable reasoning capacities, their unusually developed language skills, their interests, or their way of viewing the world, all of which were characteristic of children much older (Hollingworth, 1942).

Such children are placed in a "forced-choice dilemma" (Gross, 1989). If they want to develop their own abilities and pursue their own interests to the fullest, they must often sacrifice social companionship, because few children of their own age will take the time, or have the capacity, to engage in activities that are of interest to the extremely gifted child. If the need for social acceptance is stronger than the drive for achievement, then the gifted student may choose to severely moderate his or her achievements, and pretend to have the interests and abilities of his or her age-peers, in order to acquire a place in the social order of the classroom.

Silverman (1993) points out that, from the first years of school, gifted girls are much more skilful at concealing their talents by mimicking the behavior of the children with whom they are placed than are gifted boys. " [The gifted girls] are much more adept than gifted boys at imitation. They fit in by pretending to be less capable than they really are, disappearing into the crowd. Young gifted girls are rewarded for their compliance, and subtly taught to dull their sensibilities and intellectual acumen in the service of social acceptance."

Roshni, an exceptionally gifted Australian child of IQ 162, was reading before the age of 3, and by age 4 was writing letters to her relatives in Singapore on the family computer. Yet on entrance to kindergarten, Roshni stopped reading. She was receiving, from the kindergarten, a subtle but definite message that 3-and 4-year-olds were not expected to read, and Roshni was anxious to conform to her teacher's and class-mates' expectations. With tact, loving encouragement, and a good deal of patience, Roshni's parents were able to reassure her that she should not be ashamed of her reading ability, and after a few weeks she began to read again. The following year, however, on entering formal schooling, Roshni stopped reading again, and this time her deliberate concealment of her ability was much more difficult to reverse. It was extremely important to Roshni that she should appear "normal" so that she would be liked and accepted by her teacher and the other children in her class (Gross, 1992).

Gifted boys, on the other hand, either lack the requisite social skills or rebel against the task-and rightly so! They guard their individuality, but appear socially inept into the bargain (Silverman, 1993, p. 296). Silverman illustrates this point with an incident from one of Hollingworth's case studies of profoundly gifted children. A 6-year-old boy of IQ 187 was reported as "too immature for the work of first grade" because he would wander off in the middle of class, lie down on his back and look up at the ceiling. The child's mental age was 12, and he had the reading and math achievement of a sixth-grade student. He was bored to tears with the introductory math and reading instruction being presented to his class, yet he could not explain his dilemma to his teacher. His solution was to quietly "drop out" of the class and escape into the world of his own mind, When asked what he did lying on the floor, he said, "Oh, mostly mathematical calculations, or my imaginary land" (Hollingworth, 1930).

Unfortunately, the majority of gifted children who use the coping strategies adopted by Hollingworth's 6-year old, and by the 4-year-old Roshni, effectively disqualify themselves from consideration for academic acceleration, either because, like Hollingworth's subject, they appear "too immature" to be grade-advanced, or because, like Roshni, they have become extremely skilled at disguising the degree of their difference. Yet, ironically, grade advancement to be with older students can provide, for these extremely gifted children, a social group in which they are more likely to find true peers-children who are at the same developmental stages as they themselves.

The Exceptionally Gifted Adolescent
Junior high school can be a critical period for extremely gifted students. The onset of adolescence involves the formulation of a personal identity, and this is facilitated by the development of a group of supportive and intimate peers (Steinberg, 1985). This can be problematic for gifted adolescents who differ, in most areas of their development, from the majority of students in their chronological age cohort. The adolescent peer culture is noted for its intolerance of deviance from its standards and conventions (Coleman, 1960; Tannenbaum, 1983) and extremely gifted children may already have been aware, from an early age, of both the nature and full extent of their difference (Gross, 1993). Janos, Fung & Robinson (1985) found decreased self-esteem in gifted students who perceived themselves as "different."

For the last 10 years this author has undertaken a longitudinal study of the academic, social, and emotional development of 45 exceptionally and profoundly gifted Australian students. The considerable majority of these remarkably gifted young people has been retained, full time, in the regular classroom with minimal, or no, access to other students who share their abilities or interests. A few have been permitted a single grade-skip of 12 months-an intervention which is admirably suited to the needs of the moderately gifted, but does little to assist the extremely gifted student unless it is followed up with further grade-skips later in the child's school career. The majority of the study children have practiced a deliberate and sustained underachievement for peer acceptance since their earliest years in school; indeed, many cannot recall a time in their lives when this has not been an automatic survival mechanism, accepted as a painful but necessary part of living (Gross, 1993).

However, these extremely gifted young people are only too aware that they differ radically from age-peers in both their academic and emotional development, and that their efforts to conform to the dictates of the peer culture have had, at best, moderate success. The self-esteem of the children in this study has been measured on the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory, which is designed to measure evaluative attitudes toward the self in social, academic, family and personal areas of experience. Although the academic self- esteem of the study children is positive, the majority of the children score more than one standard deviation below the mean on the sub-scale which measures social self-esteem. They are poignantly aware of the degree to which they are disliked and rejected by their age-peers. This is not a false perception; the parents and teachers of these students also report, in interviews and school reports, their concern regarding the low self-esteem and social isolation of those highly gifted students who are confined, full time, to the regular classroom.

However, 9 of the 45 study children have been permitted radical acceleration, and are now working, in junior high, high school, or college, with students three or more years their senior. It is significant that the only students in the study whose social self-esteem is more than one standard deviation above the mean are those who have been radically accelerated. These young people are permitted to work and socialize with other students some of whom, at least, are at similar stages of intellectual and emotional development. They have access to classmates who share, or can at least empathize with, their interests, their delight in intellectual inquiry, and their ways of viewing the world. They are enjoying the social pleasures of adolescence while, at the same time, experiencing the intellectual satisfaction of challenging academic work. Fred, Christopher, and Sally are three of the study students who have entered college some years earlier than is usual.

Fred
Fred Campbell entered 11th grade two weeks before his 14th birthday. He is an extremely able and multi-talented student, with an IQ of 162. At the age of 12 years 1 month he scored 640 on the SAT-M and 500 on the SAT-V. He had taught himself to read shortly before his third birthday and shortly afterwards had acquired the basic skills of addition and subtraction. He is, furthermore, a highly gifted artist.

Fred was bitterly unhappy in elementary school and junior high school. Like many exceptionally gifted students, he had an overwhelming thirst for knowledge and by the age of 9 he was reading deeply in many fields, including psychology, art history, and adult science fiction. In elementary school, however, he was a social out-cast, derided and rejected for being different. His classmates were quite unable to understand his passion for music and mathematics, and his concern for social justice. They taunted, derided, and attacked him mercilessly, and made his life a misery. The school refused to offer Fred any form of differentiated curriculum. Their attitude was that he would be more readily accepted if he would stop "trying to be different" take a "healthy interest" in sport, and work at the level of the class. This echoes, disturbingly, Tannenbaum's findings, in the early 1960s, that academically brilliant students were tolerated in the American high school community only when their academic talent was accompanied by a keen interest in sports or athletics (Tannenbaum, 1962). Ironically, Fred had won his school's swimming championship and was placed third in his age group in a prestigious regional swimming competition, but he had little interest in sports as such, and even less interest in the Monday morning post-mortems of weekend sporting events indulged in by the other boys in his school class. Fred's undervaluing of a talent valued so highly by his classmates must have made him seem even stranger in their eyes.

Finally, in desperation, during Fred's fifth grade year, his parents approached the local high school (most Australian high schools comprise seventh through 12th grade) and asked the principal whether they would consider admitting Fred a year early. After meeting Fred, and noting his academic achievements and his emotional maturity, the principal agreed enthusiastically. Consequently, at age 10 Fred entered seventh grade and the following year he was based in eighth grade but took math and chemistry with 11th grade students. This combination of grade-skipping and subject acceleration was so successful that he was next permitted to skip ninth grade while continuing his subject acceleration in math, science, and computing. He graduated from high school in 1992, a few weeks before his 15th birthday, and currently, at 17, is in his second year of college where he is pursuing a science degree specializing in math, physics, and chemistry.

Both academically and socially, radical acceleration is, in Fred's own words, "the best thing that ever happened to me.” His 11th grade year opened up a world of social relationships that he had never before experienced. For the first time, he had access to students who understood and valued him, and accepted him as one of them. He has had no problems adjusting to college life; he is where he feels he belongs, and he feels very much at home. At 17, his friends are 19 and 20, and he says he has even more friends than he had at high school. Life is very different from the enforced segregation by chronological age that Fred experienced for his first five years of school.

Christopher
Christopher Otway is, like Fred Campbell, a remarkably gifted young man. At the age of 11 years 4 months he achieved the remarkable score of 710 on the SAT-M and 580 on the SAT-V. By the age of 4, he was capable of working at fourth grade level in math, and was reading children's encyclopedias with full comprehension and enjoyment. Chris' schools have permitted him an unusual, and highly effective, program of radical acceleration.

From the beginning, Chris' teachers responded to his academic and social needs. He was withdrawn from his first grade class each day to work with fifth grade in math and second grade in English. At the end of second grade, he was permitted to skip directly to fourth grade, and his subject acceleration continued, with Chris attending eighth grade for math, and starting flute lessons with eighth grade in recognition of his obvious aptitude for music. Several of the extremely gifted students in this Australian study also display high levels of musical precocity (Gross, 1993).

Chris' program of grade-skipping and subject acceleration has been extremely successful. In 1989, aged 12, he was based in ninth grade with students two and three years older than he, but took physics, chemistry, English, math, and economics with 11th graders who were already 17. He entered 10th grade in 1990, a few weeks after his 13th birthday, but rather than accelerate to 12th grade for individual subjects, he chose to "repeat" 11th grade in different curriculum areas, this time selecting English, legal studies, Australian history, accounting, and biology. In 1991 he entered 12th grade and took, at college entrance level, the five subjects he had taken in 1990, and in 1992 he "repeated" 12th grade, taking, in a similar manner, the five subjects he had taken in 1990. It was Chris' own decision to undertake this somewhat unusual method of acceleration. He felt he would not yet be ready, at 13 or 14, to enter college, and he was enthusiastic about the opportunity to broaden his education by taking 10, rather than the usual five, subjects in 12th grade studies. Interestingly, in both his 12th grade years, he "graduated" as one of the top students in his state.

Christopher entered the most prestigious university of his state two months after his 16th birthday. He is now in his second year of a double degree in mathematical science and economics. Like Fred Campbell, he enjoys both the academic and social side of university. Only a few weeks after enrollment he joined the university's Science Fiction Association and was promptly elected to the committee. One of the benefits he has experienced from the many university clubs is that these give him access to students at all different levels of the university. Although he formed several good friendships with the other first year students, who were two or three years his senior, he also enjoyed the company of second-and third-year students. Like many exceptionally gifted students, even in later adolescence. Chris prefers the company of people several years older than him self.

Sally
Sally Huang, age 13 has a phenomenal gift for mathematics and her English abilities are similarly astonishing. By the age of 2, Sally could read the daily newspaper, and by age 7 she was reading medical textbooks brought home by her father, a doctor.

Sally is a well-rounded young woman who has won numerous prizes for music, debating and academic excellence. She speaks fluent Chinese and Japanese, is an accomplished pianist, and holds a first-dan black belt in Tae Kwan Do.

Sally's elementary and high schools, in a large country town, allowed her radical acceleration through a series of carefully planned and monitored grade-skips. She entered seventh grade at age 9, and progressed swiftly through the grades of high school, completing 12th grade at the age of 13.

Sally has had a few gentle confrontations over the years with teachers who were reluctant to let her progress at her own rate, but she is a determined and confident young lady who expresses her feelings politely but with a quiet conviction, and in general her teachers have acceded to her wishes. It was Sally herself who requested that she skip from fifth grade to seventh grade, as she was finding the work of the younger grade rather unrewarding.

In February 1994, at age 13, Sally entered her first year of study in a large university in the capital city of her state. (The Australian academic year runs from February through November.) Her studies focus on the physical and mathematical sciences, but she has also continued with her language studies and music.

Sally experienced no particular nervousness about her entry to college. She spent some time on campus while in 11th grade, as part of a high school work experience program, and enjoyed the academic and social atmosphere. As she calmly points out, being with people older than herself is hardly a new experience, as her program of progressive acceleration through school has allowed her to work and socialize with older students for virtually her whole school career. She prefers to be with people older than herself and is valued and accepted by them.

During the week, she stays in the home of friends of her parents, within easy traveling distance of the university, and travels home each weekend. This gives her ongoing access both to the social life of the university, and to her parents and older sister with whom she has a close and warmly supportive relationship.

Conclusion
American and Australian research on the academic and social development of exceptionally and profoundly gifted students has found no evidence that social or emotional problems arise through well-planned and carefully monitored programs of radical acceleration. Rather, research suggests that we should concern ourselves with the maladjusting effects on these gifted students of being held for prolonged periods in same-age educational placements.

In Gross' study (Gross, 1992, 1993) the extremely gifted 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 than they displayed when they were grouped with age-peers, they report that the pressure to underachieve for peer acceptance has significantly diminished or has disappeared completely, and they enjoy closer and more productive social relationships than they did prior to their acceleration.

Contrary to popular myth, extremely gifted students who enter college early have few regrets at "missing" out on the traditional social activities of high school. They are more than willing to pass up "the prom" for the chance of intellectual challenge and satisfying peer relationships (Noble and Drummond, 1992). Ann Eisenberg, who received both her bachelor's and master's degrees at Johns Hopkins University at the early age of 20, comments frankly on her radical acceleration:

I think that what worries bright girls the most, and what keeps them from accelerating, is a fear of being different and, as a result, unpopular. I was never Homecoming Queen or the most popular girl in my class, but at least I've had the chance to be myself which, incidentally, is what feminism is all about. If there are some people who dislike me because I'm "too smart," I'll live through it because those aren't the people I'd want for friends anyway. In fact, the only real problem that I have being a 20-year-old graduate student in Berkeley is that the drinking age in California is 21! (Eisenberg, 1979, p. 5).

Radical acceleration would be unsuitable for the moderately gifted student, whose intellectual and psychosocial development are not as advanced as those of the exceptionally and profoundly gifted. However, for the extremely gifted, placement with students not simply one year, but several years, beyond their age, has strongly beneficial effects on their social adjustment, when the acceleration occurs through a series of carefully planned and monitored grade-skips.

The major problem is, however, to convince educators of this. Of the 45 students of IQ 160+ in Gross' study, all of whom would benefit from radical acceleration, only nine have been permitted this form of intervention. This is disturbing, but hardly surprising, when one considers the degree of teacher opposition to acceleration itself.

Grade placement by chronological age is not divinely ordained, as Carol, whose quote began this paper, wryly suggested; it is an administrative convenience. Exceptional students are surely those for whom their schools should make exceptions.

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