
Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study - barry-cotter
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-47023-001
======
barry-cotter
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 ours. Theirs, because if you’re going to be
in school you should be challenged, and ours because they’d be able to start
their professional lives earlier or with substantially more education, and
hopefully skills.

~~~
colechristensen
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 things which were to me trivially easy. There was
this constant social distance and having to put on a sort of mask in order to
interact with my "peers". At the same time everyone around me was always
telling me how smart I was.

Everything was easy until it wasn't and my subconscious was simply unprepared
to cope with not everything being trivial and socially making it very hard to
actually be myself around people because of this very strongly built in
assumption that nobody cares about what I think in conversation (amongst other
things) so that I simply couldn't think of anything to say.

The struggle is real and never really has gone away.

~~~
honkycat
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
it was: Neglect. 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.

~~~
Mirioron
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.

~~~
kharak
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.

------
avalys
Meh. I skipped 7th grade, after being in the youngest cohort in my class
already (birthday in July). I've done fine I guess - went to MIT, did some
startups, got paid plenty of money, and I'm pretty happy today (COVID
transient aside).

I thought it was cool at the time, and I was in a hurry to get out of high
school, get to college, and get on with my life, so I certainly didn't object
when my parents and teachers suggested it.

But looking back, it was weird. I couldn't drive until almost the end of high
school. Couldn't legally drink until I had already graduated college. And
while the adults at the time thought I was emotionally mature for my age - one
teacher memorably called me an "old soul" \- the truth is I was just a smart
kid who didn't cause trouble. In retrospect, I still had a lot of growing up
to do, and I wish I had the time to do a little bit more of it before entering
college and having to make decisions that really mattered.

~~~
MaximumYComb
That extra year you gained actually saved you from something though. You
didn't have to sit in a classroom being void of stimulation for that year or
later years. You were given the chance to grow intellectually instead of sit
around doing not much.

------
carlob
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.

~~~
zozbot234
> ... 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.

~~~
slantaclaus
The overall effect on everybody else is that they graduate higher ranked in
their class, benefit from grading curves, there may be others. But regardless,
saying that we have to sacrifice the smart kid so he/she can benefit the other
students....its not the kid's job to do that.

------
brianberns
Here's my data point to the contrary: I entered college a few weeks short of
my 17th birthday in the early 1980's. I was about 1.5 years younger than
others in my class, on average. I made many good friends, but my relative lack
of maturity still had a huge impact on my emotional well-being (especially
when it came to dating). I'm now in my 50's and still dealing with the
psychological repercussions of my parents' decision to accelerate me.

~~~
fatjokes
1.5 years isn't even that much? I mean you can probably find that variance
within any cohort so I doubt it was the acceleration that caused any
psychological repercussions.

~~~
kergonath
When you’re 15, 1.5 years is 10% of your whole life. I know I seriously
struggled with being significantly younger than the others in my classes.
Having gone through a PhD since then, there is no way I would have handled it
well at 20.

Besides, my experience is that if you’re so bright, there are plenty of
opportunities everywhere to satisfy your curiosity (or at least work on it).
It does not have to be at school.

------
dang
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 sort
that wasn't available back then.

There's a grass-is-greener effect though. It's easy to imagine that one would
have done better if one had been / had not been accelerated. As a philosophy
prof told me back in those early university years, "Life does not bear
counterfactuals." She also said "I bet you tell that to all the girls" when I
dropped her Hegel class.

~~~
apsec112
I was forced to _not_ skip grades, and it took me years to catch up socially
afterwards, because everyone was so hostile and school was such an oppressive,
totalitarian environment that it made me unable to trust anyone.

~~~
dang
I hear you. That's why I added the grass-is-greener skepticism. It may just be
that it sucks either way—or that we simply needed different things. It's
important not to overgeneralize from personal experiences with this stuff.

When I look back on it, I think what I needed most was for some teacher,
mentor, or older/wiser person to spend time with me. That's what would have
made the biggest difference. But I was completely isolated.

~~~
Xelbair
Then maybe instead of accelerating children down the same horrible route.. we
could create separate tracks?

I know that 'negative' (special needs) tracks are basically a disaster, but
maybe positive (group gifted children together) one would work?

------
justinram11
I consider myself pretty fortunate to have both:

1) Been accelerated after I had formed a pretty tight friend group with my
same-aged peers (jumped 2 years of math in 7th-8th grade)

2) Been born in a time where the internet was modern enough that we could all
hang out and game online

I entered University at 16 (the PSEO program in MN that pays for tuition and
books your junior and senior year of high school), but was able to keep in
touch with my high-school friend group with multiplayer video games.

Even today, a decade later, I'm still able to keep in touch with them almost
daily even though I'm living in Taiwan (started the digital nomad thing soon
after graduating University at 20).

Academically I did _really_ well in a large University environment with a lot
more autonomy, freedom, and responsibility (it's insane to me that we have 18
year olds still needing to ask permission to go to the bathroom during class).

Socially, I'll admit that I struggled to make any college-aged friends, but I
think that was more due to still living at home than anything else. Instead of
being able to take people up on offers to hang out at night, I had to make the
last bus out of Minneapolis to my small town by 6:30pm.

------
sverona
Disclaimer: it's late and I don't feel like SciHubbing it so I haven't read
past the abstract.

My N=1 opinion is that being "highly gifted" may not cause social and
emotional trauma, but it can certainly complicate unrelated trauma.

I skipped so many grades when I was a kid that they started holding me back so
I wouldn't get too "out of sync" (I did junior high twice.) I got along
socially with relatively little bullying. But I still have a lot of school-
related trauma, especially concerning emotional regulation.

My working theory is that none of my teachers had any idea how to teach a
7-year-old in the midst of kids twice their age, so they treated me like I was
twice my age, which was fine intellectually but messed me up emotionally. The
emotional impact of this has absolutely nothing to do with my giftedness; it
would mess any child up.

There are some postrationalists that tweet occasionally about how their
educational experience messed them up similarly. Qiaochu/QC Yuan is my
favorite.

Also, I'm trans and there are more of us with this story than you'd think.

~~~
gwern
Fulltext:
[https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/smpy/2020-bernstein.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/smpy/2020-bernstein.pdf)

I keep a fulltext bibliography of SMPY-related papers at
[https://www.gwern.net/SMPY](https://www.gwern.net/SMPY) \- this is just one
of many papers establishing that various kinds of enrichment and acceleration
are just fine, do no emotional damage, and _do_ save a lot of their life from
formal schooling, which has been a major premise of SMPY since Stanley founded
it in the 1960s.

~~~
sverona
Yeah, I'm agreed. My point, I suppose, is that the best "acceleration"
available to me involved a good deal of emotional neglect and a pinch of
actual abuse.

------
RhysU
If you have such a child, get them into an extracurricular where they can
compete with others based on body mass.

I got my ass kicked in varsity wrestling after a grade skip. Still, I competed
as I had since late elementary school. I could start varsity because our high
school was smallish and I fit into an open weight class.

I had a strong peer group orthogonal to my classmates. I spent time in the
weight room and otherwise working out. I learned how to handle myself for the
rare occasions that conflicts became physical. These skills helped me
immensely when I began university at 16.

------
aaronchall
As a self-motivated accelerator (I dual enrolled on-site with the local
university my senior year of high school) I can't help but feel like everyone
trying to hold me back (I was strongly discouraged) was motivated not just by
trying to keep dollars in the school and GPAs they could get credit for up,
but that they were also motivated by jealousy and a sense that what I was
doing was somehow unfairly improving my life.

The head guidance counselor mocked me. The secretary who was supposed to buy
my books and oversee my registration made me go back and forth between the
university and the high school way too many times, and had a bad attitude
about it the whole way.

Several of my friends who I had tried to get to follow me got talked out of it
by the same people.

If it's so bad for everyone else, of course they need to come up with excuses
for why it's bad for the student.

Nobody cares that these gifted students are sitting there bored. That to get
an A requires them to do meaningless busywork. That the entire situation
teaches them that success means showing up and demonstrating they're smart,
instead of the hard work that real success requires.

Staying in that high school one minute longer, with those who were vindictive,
condescending idiots, would have destroyed my psychological well-being.

My professors talked to me like I was an adult. It was very easy to respect
them and my time with them. I greatly appreciated spending my time in the
stacks instead of being made to run between classes all day, taking a pass to
go to the restroom, and getting berated by thoughtless busybodies on my way to
the library.

Our schools are first and foremost a kind of daycare that allows the adults in
all of the children's lives to go to work. Only after meeting this first goal
are they educational. Some schools are fortunate enough to not have discipline
problems. Others are not so fortunate, and the rules and instruction is
targeted to the worst performers. This greatly shortchanges those students who
need challenges - challenging books, instructions, math, performance, exams,
etc...

If anything, it is psychologically destructive to purposefully hold them back.

------
pgcj_poster
From the paper:

    
    
      Acceleration Composite = 1 × AP Courses +
                               1 × College Courses +
                               4 × Grades Skipped
    

"The average age of high school graduation was for Cohort 1: M = 17.8 years
(SD = 0.62); for Cohort 2: M = 17.7 years (SD = 0.76); and for Cohort 3: M =
17.2 years (SD = 1.02)"

According to figure 2 (pg 5), only 52 of 1497 (= 3.5%) students graduated from
high school at an age ≤ 16. So it seems like this study is measuring very
modest levels of acceleration, most of which probably comes from AP courses. I
don't think this study tells us much about 20 year-olds with PhDs, or what
would happen if we put an 8-year-old in a high school literature class, or if
we separated everyone into different tracks an a young age, or a lot of the
other things people are discussing in this thread.

------
alasdair_
> “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 huge portion of the people at the top of society
claim to be.

As a counterpoint, I wonder if the exact same study, when conducted in an
anti-intellectual society (say Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s) would still
return the same results, or if the people that were “held back” would end up
better off psychologically.

I strongly suspect the huge change in how cool it is to be nerdy today is a
significant factor in today’s wellbeing.

~~~
paganel
> 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.

~~~
mmaurizi
Pol Pot.

~~~
paganel
Yeap, that too, had forgotten about his atrocities.

------
esjeon
From my own experiences, most "gifted" students are actually from middle or
upper class families, and their parents are usually well-educated and very
interested in the education of their own children. This will positively affect
the "psychological well-being" of those kids, and likely also negate many
negative impacts of academic acceleration.

Plus, acceleration is really unnecessary these days. There's no shortage of
information on the internet, so why bother rushing into universities? Just let
kids find and follow their passion.

~~~
slantaclaus
I once did a pretty broad GIS analysis looking at different kinds of data
related to census block groups in conjunction with published standardized test
scores and the correlation between income and education is practically a
straight line.

Money and Education are a chicken and egg problem in terms of causality.

------
tmaly
I have a 6 year old daughter who has been taking lessons with the 3rd graders
this past year. I just had a conference with her teachers and they are ok to
jump her a grade. They thought two grades would have been too much socially.
But they did agree to give her advanced lessons. She is in a Montessori where
grades 1-3 are together. I really believe all children have the potential for
genius. Its all in how they are raised and what they are taught at a young
age. The Pygmalion effect has massive power over young developing minds.

~~~
nouveaux
Would you care to elaborate on the Pygmalion effect? How did you raise your
child?

~~~
tmaly
My wife and I read to her a lot when she was young. We gave her lots of open
ended play with lots of arts and crafts.

My wife taught her to read right around when she turned 4. I was also applying
some of the techniques from Glen Doman in his book How to teach your Baby to
Read.

I think learning to read is what really helped her excel. She was reading 2nd
grade chapter books by the time she started kindergarten. Once you know how to
read, you can learn about the other subjects.

There is more that we did, but I think reading to her and teaching her to read
where the biggest parts of it. The idea that any child has the potential for
genius came from Glen's book. I really think its true. Even if you only spent
15-30 minutes a day, that is enough to have a profound influence on the child.

------
getpost
I was a "mentally gifted minor" as of the 5th grade in California. This seemed
mainly to be about the schools receiving additional funding for each such
student.

The high school I attended let us vote on how the funds were spent, and we
voted to purchase musical instruments (which anyone in the school could use).
We also hired a Mandarin tutor for one quarter, which was decades ahead. I
don't remember any Mandarin except for one phrase, which translated to 'I am
reading a book.'

------
sinuhe69
This study re-enforced the result of at least three prominent longitudinal
studies about gifted education and acceleration: the study of Lewis Terman,
the study of Julian Stanley and the Marburger study.

------
joelthelion
> The accepted manuscript version of this article will be publicly available
> on 07/02/2021

Does anyone have access to the study?

------
themodelplumber
I'm curious about the inter-relational impacts in e.g. families or peer
groups. Has this aspect been studied?

------
tobmlt
Total honesty time. This topic has bothered me for years.

I went to public school and did every honors program / enrichment class / etc.
that we had. Nothing that showed me how to think about learning, however. I'll
get to that below. Furthermore, everything was easy enough that nobody ever
found out I had severe issues focusing on the material because the pacing was
so slow. I didn't think of these things as a problem at the time. I thought it
was normal to daydream then learn math sort of looking in reverse, in review
of what was covered "yesterday, while I was dreaming" or similar. More
importantly though, given the ease of the curriculum, from an early age I
thought of school as a game -- a type of intelligence test where the object
was to do as well as possible with the minimum effort, using only the
materials provided by the teacher, and the class lecture. This was reinforced
by my peer group of course, but also parents and authority figures always
telling me I was smart. With friends, the mantra, "You aren't smart if you
have to work hard" was the sort of maxim we obeyed.

This all proved to be an absolutely disastrous set of notions when I finally
arrived at university. I daydreamed through calculus -- I didn't have the
skill of focusing. I took misinformed and patchy notes and, still playing the
intelligence game, used those notes as my only source of information. I played
the game until undergrad was finished. I graduated... I'd gotten by on
geometric intuition and educated guesswork. I made b's and c's. Even as I
failed at my own game, I wondered what was wrong with me. Why was I not smart
enough?

Only at the end of my BS, after falling off the treadmill I assumed would
simply spit me out in a professorship somewhere, did I realize what a mistake
I'd made. The mistake, of course, in not taking every opportunity to maximize
what I learned and to investigate what I was curious about -- indeed, what I
loved. Only then, with no options, no academic structure before me, with every
opportunity (seemingly) past, did my eyes open to see the world as it was, and
not as the intelligence game. I type this now, 16 years later, in my home
office; a shrine to self learning... At that time, I dug out my calculus books
and started over. Soon I went to grad school for something easy -- something I
could get into based on the existence of my engineering degree alone (a degree
for which in and of itself, I was basically unemployable, or at least to which
I did not trust myself to struggle onward and use in that way). Meanwhile I
taught myself calculus over again from page 1, and began to resurrect my
prospects in the most painful way possible. Piece by piece I scrapped my
education together, getting my PhD in engineering (not physics like I wanted)
years late.

I've a very wide education now, but I am always wondering what could have
been, and now I have a toddler, almost 2 years old. One thing about the above
I know: I just want to make sure he never goes through such a process with
wool over his eyes. I want him to know from the start how to direct his
curiosity into learning what he wants, at his own pace.

------
olliej
I didn’t know that this was in question.

Most of the questions I’m aware of are reinforcement of systemic bias
(equivalently capable white and Asian kids being selected over other races),
and the diversion of funds from teaching the less “advanced” to teaching those
kids who aren’t struggling with no evidence that the acceleration actually
accomplishes anything in the long term

~~~
barry-cotter
> and the diversion of funds from teaching the less “advanced” to teaching
> those kids who aren’t struggling

This doesn’t happen. In the US gifted education gets at most 1% of all
education spending, almost certainly less. Special education gets over 20% of
all spending, probably closer to 25%. The average high school has no explicit
accommodation for gifted students and a dedicated special ed teacher.

> with no evidence that the acceleration actually accomplishes anything in the
> long term

Strong positive effects exist.

[https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf)

> Exceptionally Gifted Children: Long-Term Outcomes of Academic Acceleration
> and Nonacceleration

> a 20-year longitudinal study has traced the academic, social, and emotional
> devel- opment of 60 young australians with iQs of 160 and above. Significant
> differences have been noted in the young people’s educational status and
> direction, life satisfac- tion, social relationships, and self-esteem as a
> function of the degree of academic accel- eration their schools permitted
> them in childhood and adolescence. the considerable majority of young people
> who have been radically accelerated, or who accelerated by 2 years, report
> high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading
> universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and
> love relation- ships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by
> only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter
> less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life
> satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with
> socialization. Several did not graduate from college or high school. Without
> exception, these young people possess multiple talents; however, for some,
> the extent and direction of talent development has been dictated by their
> schools’ academic priorities or their teachers’ willingness or unwillingness
> to assist in the development of particular talent areas.

------
pl0x
This study is clearly wrong. When I was 16 I completed my CS degree, finished
university by 22, and joined an early tech company by 25. It changed my life
forever.

~~~
kranner
Are you sure you understood the abstract/title correctly? The study says there
seem to be no negative social/emotional effects of academic acceleration.

