Grade advancement is a legitimate and valuable method of meeting the needs of some intellectually or academically gifted students. Grade advancement is a way of bringing some gifted and talented children up to a level of instruction closer to their levels of achievement and pace. This method of acceleration is available to every school system. This article presents practical guidelines for making grade advancement decisions.

A major educational need or gifted and talented youth, as for all students, is for instruction in the basic skill areas and the standard or disciplines at a level and pace which challenges, but does not exceed, their potential.

Feldhusen and Klausmeier (1959), Klausmeier and Feldhusen (1959) and Feldhusen, Check and Klausmeier (1961) conducted a series of experiments in which they demonstrated that when a new learning task is selected at just the right level of student readiness, the skill or concept is learned well and will be more effectively remembered and generalized to other relevant problem situations. When a new task is to be learned, it is too difficult, students are frustrated; when it is too easy, they are bored and lose interest in learning.

Most teachers do some individualization to meet children's skill and conceptual levels. Some teachers are renowned for a high degree of individualization and efforts to adapt instruction to a broad range of levels while others keep all students in a lockstep at one common level. In general, therefore, a student's experience with individualized instruction may be haphazard from year to year.

Furthermore, few teachers are able to individualize sufficiently to meet the needs of gifted and talented students. Many are limited by school policy which prohibits them from securing and using higher level instructional materials. Additionally, teachers at higher grade levels sometimes complain that they will have nothing left to teach if teachers at lower grade levels cover the material.

The most appropriate educational provision for gifted and talented youth is a system of specifically designed classes which provide learning activities at an appropriate pace and level and which emphasize the process skills of critical thinking and research. Unfortunately this type of educational provision is not yet available to most gifted and talented youth. However, one of the more readily available educational alternatives for the intellectually or academically gifted student is grade advancement.

While it is rarely the case that the student would be advanced to a level which fits his or her grade equivalent scores on achievement tests, advancement of a year or two often brings the child closer to an appropriate level of challenge and pace and into contact with more intellectually stimulating peers.

While school personnel express great concern about possible social-emotional dangers in grade advancement, research indicates that the concern is usually unfounded, and that we should possibly be equally concerned about the social-emotional dangers of holding gifted students back in the lockstep of graded instruction.

Grade advancement studies are almost uniformly supportive of the procedure. A comprehensive review of the literature on grade advancement and its effects on children was undertaken by the authors and used as the basis for developing the guidelines presented in this article. Although space does not permit a discussion of those research reports, the entire bibliography is presented at the end of this article.

These studies support the following generalizations:

1. There is no empirical basis in the belief that grade advancement will result in either social-emotional maladjustment or gaps in learning;
2. Objective measures of educational performance and subjective measures of student and parent satisfaction suggest that grade advancement results in far more positive consequences than negative ones;
3. Academically, it does not seem to matter which grade level the child does not directly experience. We conclude, therefore, that grade advancement could be used more frequently in meeting the needs of the intellectually or academically gifted student. To be most effective, grade advancement should be well planned and carefully evaluated.

The major purpose of this paper is to present a practical set of guidelines for making grade advancement decisions. We believe that grade advancement decisions should be based on a more comprehensive individual assessment. An ideal response to a request for grade advancement would be to consider the following guidelines which have emerged from our experiences and our examination of the research literature.

1. There should be a comprehensive psychological evaluation of the child's intellectual functioning, academic skill levels and social-emotional adjustment by a psychologist.
2. Intellectually, the child should have an IQ of 125 or higher or have a level of mental development above the mean grade he or she desires to enter.
3. Academically, the child should demonstrate skill levels above the mean of the grade desired. If the child is high in several skill levels but low in only one, the child may be advanced to the appropriate grade if private tutoring is provided in the area of weakness. Conversely, some children's academic skill levels vary considerably. That is, they may be very far advanced in mathematics but just moderately above in language arts or reading. For such children, it may be best to keep them in grade but allow them to work with a higher grade only for the subject in which they are precocious.
4. Socially and emotionally, the child should be free of any serious adjustment problems. Additionally, the child should demonstrate a high degree of persistence and motivation for learning. However, in specific cases there may be serious adjustment problems caused by inappropriately low grade placement. In such cases, the problem may be alleviated by grade advancement.
5. Physically, the child should be in good health. The child's size should be considered only to the extent that competitive sports may be viewed as important in later years.
6. The psychologist should determine that the child does not feel unduly pressured by the parents to advance. The parents must be in favor of grade advancement but the child should express the desire to move ahead.
7. The receiving teacher or teachers must have positive attitudes toward the acceleration and be willing to help the child adjust to the new situation. If a receiving teacher is hostile or pessimistic, another receiving teacher should be located or the move should not be made.
8. Public school teachers are sometimes unduly pessimistic about children's social-emotional maturity. For a precocious child, they might confuse a child's misbehavior which is caused by dissatisfaction with inappropriate instruction with immaturity. Judgments about a precocious child's maturity should therefore include input from parents and the psychologist.
9. Efforts are generally made to have grade advancement occur at natural transition points such as the beginning of a new school year. However, mid year advancements may sometimes be desirable because the new teacher and the teacher the child is leaving may more easily confer about how best to help the child make a smooth transition. They should especially review the child's skill levels to make sure the receiving teacher is aware of any special needs and weaknesses.
10. All cases of grade advancement should be arranged on a trial basis. A trial period of six weeks should be sufficient. The child should be aware that if it does not go well he or she may request to be returned to the original grade. During the trial period, counseling services should be available to the child or teacher as needed.
11. Care should be exercised not to build up excessive expectations from grade advancement. The child should not be made to feel he or she is a failure if it does not go well. Alternatively, some precocious children are so advanced in their intellectual and academic skills that one year of advancement may still leave them bored in school. For a very few precocious children additional advancements may be necessary.
12. Grade advancement decisions should be based on facts rather than myths. Examination of the research literature reveals that acceleration contributes to academic achievement. No negative effects on social or emotional development have been identified. If adjustment problems occur, they tend to be minor and temporary in nature.

Conversely, failure to advance a precocious child may result in poor study habits, apathy, lack of motivation and maladjustment.

Grade advancement is a method of acceleration which is available to every school system. For many school systems with limited resources, small student populations, or both, grade advancement may be the primary means available for adjusting the educational program to meet the educational and social- emotional needs of gifted and talented youth. For school systems with gifted and talented programs, grade advancement should be one of the services available along with other options which may be offered.

Grade advancement should be considered as one legitimate and valuable method of meeting the needs of the intellectually or academically gifted. When practiced wisely, students have been found to maintain their interest in school, excel academically, and complete higher levels of education. Thus, grade advancement benefits not only the child but society as well.

The guidelines presented here are based on insights from the research reviewed and from our own experiences as consultant psychologists in many cases of grade advancement decision making. The guidelines can serve to make the decision-making process more systematic and reliable educational service for gifted and talented children.

Permission Statement

Permission to reprint this article was granted to the Davidson Institute for Talent Development by the author and publisher, Roeper Review, www.roeperreview.org.

This article is provided as a service of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to supporting profoundly gifted young people under 18. To learn more about the Davidson Institute’s programs, please visit www.DavidsonGifted.org.