Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study • Hacker News Board

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#101

Post by kharak » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 10:07 AM UTC

Mirioron wrote: post #71

honkycat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Exactly. Precisely the same thing for me. I was reading at an absurdly young age. School for me was a special sort of hell where I was able to read at a 12th grade level in 3rd grade, and yet a decade later was in class with people who could not yet read. I would stare at the clock and switch between sleeping and being insanely bored. I'm 31 years old now and I feel I have enough life experience to call it what…

What helped me get through the boredom of school was to learn to daydream. Any time there's something boring going on I can tune out from that and daydream. Walking around while doing it is great. The downside of it is that it's not productive and once you're out of school you don't need it to occupy your time, but you still want to.

I struggle with this. Daydreaming is my instant Dopamin release system, always available, especially when I have to deal with something boring. But I'm getting better by improving work package size, removing barriers beforehand. That increases flow and flow is pleasant even while doing mundane tasks.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#102

Post by paganel » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 10:10 AM UTC

alasdair_ wrote: post #32

> “elite science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduate students (N = 478) identified in 1992. Their educational histories were assessed at age 25 and they were followed up at age 50 using the same psychological assessments.” One thing to consider is the fact that America during the period 1992 to 2020, has seen a vast societal shift from nerds being seen as social outcasts to being seen as the thing a hu…

> say Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s

I'd say Nazi Germany in the late 1930s was more of an anti-Jewish intellectual society, more than an anti-intellectual society pure and simple, the reason being that them being mostly a technocratic State they highly needed those intellectuals, engineers and technicians. One of the many proofs is the work of von Braun, without which us as a species wouldn't have gotten to the Moon as fast as we did. The same discussion goes for Soviet Russia, with some exceptions (mostly genetics-related work, where the politruks intervened in a very harmful way for their scientists).

IMO the only true anti-intellectual regime that I know of from the 20th century is represented by Mao's relatively short-lived Cultural Revolution in China, a policy which was pretty quickly reversed.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#103

Post by blahedo » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 10:13 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #28

I wonder if they lack good ways of measuring this. I skipped a few grades and started university at 15. It took years to catch up socially and in many ways I never did. I wouldn't recommend it. In retrospect, I'd say a better thing to do with a smart kid is to convince them that they should work on things they're not as good at. Nobody's good at everything. However, that would have required individual attention of a…

Anecdotal counterpoint: I too skipped three grades (early ones) and ended up in college at 15 (and then on to grad school at 19); and based on how I reacted to boredom even then I am deeply certain that if I hadn't been accelerated, and just given "enrichment" or whatever, I would have checked out and washed out. Meanwhile, I certainly had a different social trajectory than your typical teen-20s-30s person, but that was probably a foregone conclusion.

But, anecdotes.

> I wonder if they lack good ways of measuring this.

The rest of your post implies that you wonder that because you had a bad social experience; but the study is not claiming that people who are accelerated have good outcomes. It's saying that acceleration-or-not doesn't covary with psychological outcomes (which is basically what's going on in your "grass-is-greener" comment)—your life could suck, or not, but either way it's not because you did or didn't get accelerated.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#104

Post by hobofan » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 10:29 AM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #75

barry-cotter wrote: post #2

There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childcare acceleration would be the norm for bright children and we’d have 14 year olds starting their Bachelor’s level studies in every school and 20 year olds who already had doctorates in every city of any size. Instead we waste their time, to their detriment and…

I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace. For instance my kid is starting to read about stuff they normally only introduce in high school, but there's no way he will ever be examined on it until then (he's turning 8 in a few weeks). If someone wants to learn something, luckily these says we have the likes of Khan Academy and other internet resour…

> What is the rationale for keeping everyone together, other than timetabling issues?

That's exactly the issue, together with too many children per teacher. Unless you can adequately replace a teacher with digital learning solutions (still very sparse; even worse in non-english speaking countries), any increase in "own pace" would result in an increase of teacher-student time.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#105

Post by carlob » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 10:51 AM UTC

I wonder if there are any studies about the effects of removing highly gifted students from a class of otherwise average students. I'm aware of a few about the lack socioeconomic mixing: rich kids in classes with just rich kids seem to see almost no positive effect, but poor kids who experience a good social mix in their class fare far better than their peers who are in schools where everybody comes from a poor background.

I would expect a similar effect here: gifted kids who are accelerated might show no long term negative psychological effects, and might do a little better academically, but what about the overall effect on everybody else? Is it really better to have classes with the 1% smartest removed?

At least from a political and ethical perspective I would advocate for greater mixing, teaching more fortunate kids that they should put their advantages to fruit by pulling the rest of the class. In other words focus on collaboration rather than competition. However, I have no data to back this up.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#106

Post by Mvandenbergh » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 10:57 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #28

I wonder if they lack good ways of measuring this. I skipped a few grades and started university at 15. It took years to catch up socially and in many ways I never did. I wouldn't recommend it. In retrospect, I'd say a better thing to do with a smart kid is to convince them that they should work on things they're not as good at. Nobody's good at everything. However, that would have required individual attention of a…

>In retrospect, I'd say a better thing to do with a smart kid is to convince them that they should work on things they're not as good at. Nobody's good at everything. However, that would have required individual attention of a sort that wasn't available back then.

Yes and no. On the one hand, there is a lot to be said for ensuring a balance in learning, making sure that everyone has basic competence in a number of things, and exposing children to things they might not otherwise encounter and might really like.

On the other hand, if you look at achievement among adults along basically any kind of axis you find that success generally comes from extreme interest in and specialisation in a small number of things. There has to be an age and a level of basic general competence where we recognise that it is sensible for child to follow the things they are most interested in.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#107

Post by zozbot234 » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

carlob wrote: post #105

I wonder if there are any studies about the effects of removing highly gifted students from a class of otherwise average students. I'm aware of a few about the lack socioeconomic mixing: rich kids in classes with just rich kids seem to see almost no positive effect, but poor kids who experience a good social mix in their class fare far better than their peers who are in schools where everybody comes from a poor backg…

> ... what about the overall effect on everybody else? Is it really better to have classes with the 1% smartest removed?

This is a function of the method of instruction. "Pulling up the rest of the class" ought to be the teacher's job in the first place but these sorts of "direct instruction" (DI) based workflows, which do help less fortunate kids a lot, have become extremely unpopular. Every teacher wants to be teaching the 1% of gifted kids and have them "learn everything on their own"; no one wants to actually do the hard work of teaching.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#108

Post by lordnacho » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 11:26 AM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #84

lordnacho wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace. For instance my kid is starting to read about stuff they normally only introduce in high school, but there's no way he will ever be examined on it until then (he's turning 8 in a few weeks). If someone wants to learn something, luckily these says we have the likes of Khan Academy and other internet resour…

> I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace. Just a guess: as far as I understood US parents are very good at lobbying schools administration, and a lot of them would hate to see that some kids are smarter or more advanced than theirs. Now regarding your ladder idea, in some cantons in Switzerland and some Bundesländer in Germany the school system…

This is not quite what I had in mind, though. I lived in Switzerland as well, and it seems more like a traditional education system where everyone in the academic stream still needs to learn a broad range of subjects at the same pace as each other. Also having a single cutoff time at roughly age 12 seems quite harsh to me.

I'm more thinking that you could learn English at an age-average pace while being ahead in math and physics, if that's what you wanted. Or vice versa. Qualifications would simply be a number of progressions that people could advance at their own leisure, perhaps with some sort of minimum so that you don't totally neglect certain core subjects.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#109

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 11:37 AM UTC

honkycat wrote: post #62

colechristensen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experienced long term psychological effects from lack of proper education pacing. From the very beginning, I entered kindergarten as the only one in my class able to read. The teacher, doing her best, sent me off to read by myself in the corner as she taught the rest of the class. In the years where your brain is programmed to adapt itself to the environment it expects for the rest of life, I only ever had to do th…

Yes. Exactly. Precisely the same thing for me. I was reading at an absurdly young age. School for me was a special sort of hell where I was able to read at a 12th grade level in 3rd grade, and yet a decade later was in class with people who could not yet read. I would stare at the clock and switch between sleeping and being insanely bored. I'm 31 years old now and I feel I have enough life experience to call it what…

> I was left in a corner to rot in child jail for a over a decade, during some of the most important years of my life, and constantly punished for the crime of being a bored young person whose time is being wasted.

I read the story of Thomas Edison and think what would have happened to him in our time. He would have been medicated up the wazoo until he finally became a quiet, docile little boy who sat in class and did as he was told. I doubt he would have however turned in the massively productive revolutionary inventor (with apologies to Tesla of course) that he did.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#110

Post by jstewartmobile » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 11:40 AM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #2

There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childcare acceleration would be the norm for bright children and we’d have 14 year olds starting their Bachelor’s level studies in every school and 20 year olds who already had doctorates in every city of any size. Instead we waste their time, to their detriment and…

be careful what you wish for. per GBS: "all professions are conspiracies against the laity"