Two main possibilities to match the curriculum to the needs of highly gifted children:
1) Put them together in a special class composed entirely of students with similar level of giftedness, taught by specialized teachers using a gifted curriculum.
2) Move them to a higher grade, which means they will need to study with (possibly much) older students.
Option 1) is superior for their social development since they are not more mature in all respects. It should be pursued whenever possible.
Option 2) may also subject the kids to bullying and jealousy by their older peers, some of whom might do worse than the gifted one in many academic subjects despite age difference.
Early grouping by ability is also more desirable. From the paper:
"In both Australia and the United States, schools tend to delay acceleration and ability grouping until the middle years of elementary school. This policy is fundamentally flawed. It is in the early years of school that we should be identifying exceptionally and profoundly gifted children and developing programs of acceleration and grouping to provide a more effective response to their accelerated intellectual and emotional development."
It is in the interest of society to develop highly gifted students fully since they have more potential to invent groundbreaking technologies or contribute to society in an extraordinary way.
Source: I have taught many gifted and highly gifted students over the years.
Leta Hollingworth agreed with you that 1) is the optimal approach. Unfortunately for the exceptionally gifted, they are rare enough (by definition—4 standard deviations is less than 1 in 10k—although I've read that it's flatter than a normal distribution) that it is difficult to get enough of them into one place to make a whole class out of them, unless you run a boarding school or have a very dense population (Leta Hollingworth worked out of New York).
She also agreed, at least implicitly (I'm struggling to find the best quote), about the importance of starting early. "Such struggles as these [describing a 7-year-old who tried to show his favorite books to the other kids, who "resisted his efforts, made fun of him, threw the treasures on the floor, and finally pulled his hair"], if they continue without directing the child's insight, may lead to complete alienation from his contemporaries in childhood, and to misanthropy in adolescence and adulthood."
What I’ve seen working in practice is grouping the highly gifted with older ‘merely’ gifted kids (combining 1) and 2)). If the latter group is 1 in 100, there would be enough of them to form a class even in a smaller city (Say a city with pop 200,000 & 2000 births per year means 20 gifted kids per cohort).
The gifted ones tend to focus on learning and have similar inclinations to the highly gifted so it works out socially, as long as overt competition is kept to a minimum.
That probably works better at the elementary and middle-school-age ranges (I'm thinking pre-calculus, pre-high-school work). Once you get to traditional high-school level, I think even the 2 years older "merely gifted" kids will be holding back the younger truly exceptional.
100% agree that it's way, way better than the current state of the art which seems to me to basically be "as long as they aren't causing trouble, we're happy to have them bored in class and pulling up our standardized testing results..."
Yes, agree about the increasing difference. At the high school level, it’s often better to group more highly gifted students together. They are generally able to live further away from their parents so population size is less of a problem by then.
This is actually a common practice in several Asian countries. There are a couple national-level magnet schools and (highly) gifted classes within those schools where these kids are taught and trained by special teachers and curriculum specialized to their talent—math, science, language.
It’s likely that excessive desire for educational “equality” despite adverse consequences in some other countries squanders the potentials of many such kids.
Yeah I wonder how much "grading schools & teachers by standardized testing" has discouraged advanced learning programs (because they want to juice their scores). The future historians will condemn this age for holding back talented kids.
Your #2 clashes with my own experience. Every time I took classes with the older kids or skipped grades, I actually did better socially. And it certainly wasn't due to me being socially advanced. Rather, I think it was because I became less of a target for monkeysphere competition.
Only extracurricularly - summer programs etc. Those were generally good, but not comparable in my mind since all the kids there wanted to be there, as opposed to schools (especially public schools) having a dynamic befitting a jail.
There weren't enough "gifted" people around for the numbers to work out for #1. During my whole time, I was aware of one other student skipping a grade and only a handful taking classes from the next grade up. The closest I got in a school setting was one elective AP class in high school.
I only skipped two grades, going from older to average to younger. I could see a larger age gap being different for socialization, but not with regards to bullying - there is no gain from beating on someone that's much smaller.
In my experience I got both at once pretty early (skipped 2nd grade and was in a "gifted" class from 4-7). Looking back, I think the class was a dumping ground for trouble students (oops!). My memories were - we went through six teachers, didn't get along, were isolated from the rest of the school, and didn't learn very much.
My high school, OTOH, was iron-firm about sticking everyone together - no advanced classes (until AP) and no advancing grades. The first few months were a shock; after that I had a great time and really applied myself. Never could make up that extra year in height, though.
Did you and classmates have a teacher who understood the needs and special curriculum for highly gifted kids too? If otherwise, it could be lackluster since most teachers don’t know how to handle them or keep them engaged.
Einstein’s tutor when he was a kid was an medical student who later became a noted ophthalmologist with a Wikipedia entry of his own. Gauss’ 4th grade teacher asked the class he was in to sum from 1 to 100, hoping to engage them for the whole period, and couldn’t believe how fast Gauss finished it.
ADDED: For exceptionally gifted students, I estimate they should have someone with the intellect equivalent to a PhD or a masters graduate from a top program to teach them once they are in late primary school (and sometimes sooner).
There is another option that would be progressive "inclusive" approach: allowing more flexibility in teaching content and materials so that teachers can provide different exercises, challenges, etc to different students in the same class. This is a matter of having a trust-based (rather than Control-Bäder) system with highly qualified teachers and high autonomy for those teachers. The evidence indicates that all - gifted, special needs and any other students and teachers which enjoy increased autonomy. This is the approach in eg Portugal, Finland, Estonia, Norway, ...
The paper in question says that children moved to higher grades actually do better socially. They can fit in in many ways, just not age. Compare that to the nonaccellerated kids who can fit in in terms of age, but not much else.
They compare students who were vs were not accelerated to a higher grade level but does not include option 1) above, which is not a normal class composed of average students of the same age but a class tailored for gifted ones.
Option 1 doesn't seem generally feasible to me. If you are targeting the 1 in 10,000 kids in the article, and want say 10 grades worth of them, with maybe 10 kids per class, then your looking for a population of 100 kids drawn from a population of 1,000,000 kids. Good luck finding a population of 1M kids geographically close enough to be served by one school. Even if you're targeting the 1 in 1,000 kids, the geography is a super hard problem.
1) Put them together in a special class composed entirely of students with similar level of giftedness, taught by specialized teachers using a gifted curriculum.
2) Move them to a higher grade, which means they will need to study with (possibly much) older students.
Option 1) is superior for their social development since they are not more mature in all respects. It should be pursued whenever possible.
Option 2) may also subject the kids to bullying and jealousy by their older peers, some of whom might do worse than the gifted one in many academic subjects despite age difference.
Early grouping by ability is also more desirable. From the paper:
"In both Australia and the United States, schools tend to delay acceleration and ability grouping until the middle years of elementary school. This policy is fundamentally flawed. It is in the early years of school that we should be identifying exceptionally and profoundly gifted children and developing programs of acceleration and grouping to provide a more effective response to their accelerated intellectual and emotional development."
It is in the interest of society to develop highly gifted students fully since they have more potential to invent groundbreaking technologies or contribute to society in an extraordinary way.
Source: I have taught many gifted and highly gifted students over the years.