I agree with you WRT age appropriate-ness. Just because something can or has been introduced at a certain age does not mean that is optimal. I recall a study I saw recently that showed delaying introducing one subject - it may have been math - to very young students had negligible impacts on their scores (compared to students who were introduced earlier) a few years later. The students with a delayed introduction caught up so quickly that the delay didn’t matter. I’ll see if I can dig up a link - EDIT, I’m struggling to find it under all of the COVID-related student-delay-catch-up articles.
Yes and there are some kids that act up or learn to hate education and the system for being forced into what amounts to remedial classes. Sometimes the brightest children are the most difficult precisely because they're not being challenged.
The ideal would be to have every student learn at their own pace. Some children could comprehend algebra in 8th grade, others may never fully comprehend it.
Obviously that's impossible at scale. So the best we can do is to separate kids based on ability and interest. Some children can grasp more advanced concepts at an earlier age, while others struggle. That's why generally in schools we have standard classes, special education and gifted classes. The best schools separate it even further offering additional lessons or tutoring to children that are especially curious or require more work.
Everyone benefits. This is common sense.
There's no such thing as "appropriate topics" for an age. It's all child specific.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/01623737211008919
https://www.nber.org/papers/w17089
These programs are relatively expensive, and there’s a strong argument the gifted programs should be overhauled, or that the money could be better spent elsewhere.
I really don't need a study telling me my child won't benefit from a gifted program. It's a parent's right to decide for themselves. I personally know many people that have benefitted and it made their childhood bearable.
Barring a time machine or the discovery of a way to skip across a multiverse, this is an assertion without much of a control group.
That’s why we need studies.
In elementary school gifted programs are often tracking people into advanced math, reading, and other subjects all at once. Plus teaching them extra stuff.
At higher grades, if it exists at all, its often tracking them into a different school that has both more advanced and more diverse classes.
> A gifted program is where you take some kids aside and teach them some random extra stuff, at the end of the day they're still in the regular classes with the other kids also and don't really have a chance to go any faster.
I’ve heard of lots of different gifted programs, and most don't fit that description.
My kid's school did exactly this for "gifted" elementary school kids. What saved him was being in split grade classes in 2nd and 3rd grades where he could move to the older student's side of the room for math and reading instruction. Eventually, he skipped 4th grade altogether and ended up with the peer group he was already spending much of his day with.
In middle school, the gifted kids got to go on one special field trip each year. By HS, there was a gifted program in name only. We paid someone to run the "gifted" program but I have no idea what she actually did. She wasn't even available to assist in college apps and there weren't any special programs that I ever saw. My kid, and his most motivated peers, all ended up at very good universities in spite of the lack of support from the school.
Those are modern cut rate gifted programs.
The 90s had gifted programs where students who tested well got placed into a separate cohort for core classes (English, History, Math) in Middle and High School, or were in a dedicated classroom for elementary school.
The only educational purpose served was getting them out of the classroom so that more attention could be given to the dumber kids.
So much more was expected of us, that of course we came out learning more. 8th grade was a 20 page research project. 6th grade math was algebra, in 7th grade we learned logarithms and binary math.
When I went back to mainstream academics in high school, the difference was stark. In one of my city's top schools, students were still reading books out loud during class. Expected reading assignments were around a couple dozen pages a week. Math was all repeating what I had learned in middle school. Essays were a fraction the length and difficulty.
And in high school I knew plenty of smart kids who were bored to tears and misbehaved. Hell I watched one kid in Latin class piece his own nipple. (The teacher did nothing, possibly because said student was also pretty darn good at Latin...)
I wonder how a study is going to account for "smart kids who dropped out of school from sheer boredom".
Another aspect to examine is that behavior problems in gifted programs were, IMHO, much less than in mainstream classrooms. When all the students in the classroom are there to learn, no big surprise, learning gets done. Students turn in HW on time, listen when the teacher talks, and have expectations of not only themselves, but of each other.
Yes, gifted programs need to be accessible across socio-economic levels. The fact that I had to be bused to the rich part of town to go to a gifted program is a great example of classist and racist policies in action.
> while being fairly expensive.
I fail to see how gifted programs cost any more than regular programs. You are literally taking the highest achievers and placing them in a separate classroom for a few core subjects. For middle school and high school, there are no additional teachers, no additional programs in place, it is purely a cohort.
> and they don’t appear to make any meaningful difference in student engagement or motivation.
As someone from a poor working class family, gifted programs gave me the opportunity to rise up out of generations of being poor.
Gifted programs need to be made available to everyone who qualifies.
The fact is, one college graduate can help elevate an entire family. Every student needs to be given the chance to reach their full potential, and for some, that means placing them in an environment which has an expectation of academic excellence and lifelong achievement.
Edit: I just reviewed the study my local school district did to justify shutting down their spectrum program. None of the reasons (!!!) had to do with student outcomes.
I would suggest that your experiences may not have been the norm. Anecdotally - I was also in a gifted program, and it was essentially a waste of the school’s money. We had an designated educator for the gifted program, and we mostly did things that were interesting… but didn’t really advance our education a lot. Even when we did cover advanced material, it didn’t really make a difference because we would have learned it in a year or two anyways. That assigned educator would have made a bigger difference helping struggling students rather than us.
It sounds like your program was maybe better targeted than ours, or you were a better fit for the model than me and my cohort. But on average, the data seems to suggest that most students are not significantly changed by gifted programs.
9: 14-15
10: 15-16
11: 16-17
12: 17-18
Year 7 was geometry focused, Pythagoras theorem a lot of graphing things with protractors compasses etc. Calculating angles from parallel lines stuff like that.
Year 8 was much more algebra centric quadradic formula, simultaneous equations, expansion of brackets.
Year 9 was Trigonometry I remember there was a lot of 3d shapes and volumes. Volume of spheres, cones, pyramids etc.
Year 10 was Conic sections circles Ellipsis Parabolas hyperbola etc a lot of graphing again and more advanced trig.
In Year 11 and 12 I took the most advanced of the math streams I had two math classes. My other courses were Physics, Chemistry, Biology and English So math was a third of my course load, more if you counted physics which was highly math based as well.
Year 11 One class was Calculus focused, limits, fundamental theorem, basic derivatives and simple integration (Simpson's rule and stuff like that). The other class was linear algebra, vecrors, dot and cross products basic matrix manipulation and matrix transformation - reflectons skew etc.
Year 12 We covered parametric calculus, complex numbers more advanced integration and derivatives (Chain rule, substitutions etc). I vaguely remember we covered a bit of hyperbolic functions (cosh, sinh etc). The other course was statistics and probability as well things like sequences and series, stuff like binomial theorem.
I studied Engineering at uni and my first year university math was pretty much a repeat of year 11 and 12 math but a bit more in depth.