Some kids skip a grade in school. What research has been done that looks at the effect this has on the kids, both in the short term (i.e., while they’re still in grade school) and the long term (i.e., after they’ve graduate grade school)?
-FrL-
Some kids skip a grade in school. What research has been done that looks at the effect this has on the kids, both in the short term (i.e., while they’re still in grade school) and the long term (i.e., after they’ve graduate grade school)?
-FrL-
It made me a social outcast through middleschool, and a 16-year-old college freshman. 16, without parental supervision, in a beer-rich environment? I am shocked that I survived at all.
Nothing really dramatic. Although there were other factors, I suspect it may have had something to do with my appreciation of older women. I also think having been the oddball made me more understanding of people who are ‘different’ for whatever reason.
I was snatched away from my colleagues as we sat coloring on construction paper and ushered down the hall to a darkened room where two dozen older, unfamilar kids tore their attention away from a filmstrip about the English vowels to stare at me with jaws agape. Life has been all downhill since.
Respecting your call for research, from a quick PsycInfo search I found an abstract for this artcle:
The young college student. Sarbaugh, M. E.; School & Society, 40, 1934. pp. 823-824.
It says that “The author paired 57 students entering the University of Buffalo at the age of 16 or under with students who, although two years older, were still of equal ability according to high-school scholarship and test criteria.” The grades of the young freshmen did not differ significantly from the older students, continued their educations just as fully, and overall did not see their age as a handicap. “The author concludes that at present letting the superior student skip grades is the most practical solution of the problem arising out of his relative superiority.”
Of course, that’s 1934. Sure, times have changed. For one, I was a 16 year old college freshman and there sure weren’t 57 others at my school (though a different school more known for having higher achievers might, I don’t know). I just know it wasn’t easy at all to get me moved up a grade. Anecdotally, I didn’t suffer much at all. The class I left did a pretty good job of hating on me for a while, but my new class didn’t seem to care much. Then I grew up with them and although at least two years younger, ended up virtually indistinguishable from them (confirmed by people who knew me for years without ever knowing or suspecting an age difference). Academically, any problems I had were more problems of mindset and focus (which I still struggle with after going back to graduate school at 28) rather than not being capable of the work because of my age. I got a B.S. in Computer Science at 20.
I’ll try to look for more research, surely something has been done, I just need the right search terms. Is there a more formal terminology for skipping a grade than just “skipping a grade?” “Advanced placement” and the like apply to all sorts of things and bring up too many results.
Oooh, “academic acceleration” is the magic word. EBSCO search within Teacher Reference Center, PsycINFO, and PsycARTICLES (just a very FEW of the many articles found this time):
Viadero, D. (2004, September 29). Report Urges Acceleration for Gifted Students. Education Week, 24(5), 5-5. Retrieved March 5, 2009, from Teacher Reference Center database.
The study they’re talking about here is called “A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students.” Looking up this article would of course give the references of the research the study’s authors are “pointing to.”
Hoogeveen, L., van Hell, J., & Verhoeven, L. (2009, Winter2009). Self-Concept and Social Status of Accelerated and Nonaccelerated Students in the First 2 Years of Secondary School in the Netherlands. Gifted Child Quarterly, 53(1), 50-67.
Gross, M. (2006, June). Exceptionally gifted children: Long-term outcomes of academic acceleration and nonacceleration. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 29(4), 404-429. Retrieved March 5, 2009, from PsycINFO database.
Swiatek, M., & Benbow, C. (1991, December). Ten-year longitudinal follow-up of ability-matched accelerated and unaccelerated gifted students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(4), 528-538. Retrieved March 5, 2009, doi:10.1037/0022-0663.83.4.528
I skipped a grade early in my education, 3rd grade. I think much of it has to do with missing Kindergarten. I lived in the sticks in Montana at the time. My Mom did what she could to prepare me for school, which involved a lot of reading and writing. It turns out that I was much better prepared for the first grade than any of my classmates.
The skip had little social effect, since I was a fairly new student in a new school at the time. The only difference I noticed occurred in high school. I made the varsity hockey and baseball teams as a freshman, and took some ribbing for certain areas of physical development, if you know what I mean. That all stopped when I became the starting catcher 2 games into my freshman year.
I was skipped ahead at age 6 (middle of Year 2 to middle of Year 3), which is quite unusual in the UK. Primary school was great. Secondary school (ages 11-18 normally) sucked more and more. I was a late developer anyway, and being a year behind made it very obvious. Was socially very immature as well, and didn’t start to catch up until towards the end of my undergrad degree.
If my (as-yet non-existent) kids ever get offered it, I will not be keen.
A teacher told us that middle school can be a problem when kids are younger than their classmates. For that reason my son started kindegarten a year later than he could have, he did an extra year in preschool.
Yeah, this was my experience too, almost to a T. I know it was better for my academic well-being, but you know what? Fark that. I would have made out just as fine academically as a 17-year-old high school grad as I did at 15, and probably would have been much more rounded both socially and academically. It’s been 20 years now and I still sometimes think I haven’t come to terms with it; my fault, I know, but there it is.
I skipped first grade. I don’t think it hurt me at all. I was a bit socially awkward, but I don’t think it had anything to do with that.
If we get some more anecdotes, soon we’ll have data!
There are also people like me, who didn’t skip a grade but wish we had. Academically, I probably could have. I was a social outcast anyway, so that wouldn’t have been any different. But I could have gone to college and gotten out of living with my parents a year or two earlier, which would have been good. Our relationship was definitely strained by the time I graduated from high school. We started getting along a lot better once we weren’t living together any more.
I left for Christmas break in 1st grade, and returned in January to 2nd grade. For about the first 3 days, I was the new kid. After that, it was nothing different, it was all I knew - growing up as the youngest kid in my graduating class. No looking after-effects, no psychoses, no odd little quirks.
Nope. Really. None.
What are you looking at?
In New York, in the mid-60s at least, junior high school students could be placed in an honors program called SP, for special progress. There were two versions - one in which you went through 3 years of junior high (7-9) enriched, and one where you skipped grade 8. In my junior high there were 6 SP classes, 3 2 year and 3 3 year. You’d think someone would study such an interesting population. What is especially interesting about it is that the pressures from going alone in a new class are removed, since for two years the 2 year SP students were with their peers of the same age, and could maintain friendships. I have no idea if there was such a study, but it being New York would make it very convenient for someone to do it.
Good point, and one that I thought was kind of interesting in some of the studies I cited above – they tended to compare “gifted” students who had been accelerated against other gifted non-accelerated students: and most of them found really no appreciable difference. That’s important, because it implies (and some studies have researched further) that some accelerated students may tend to blame social problems on their relative youth that probably would have been problems regardless.
Seriously, if anyone interested has access to a library that purchases Teacher Reference Center, PsycINFO, and/or PsycARTICLES, there’s a LOT of research that has been done on the topic (again, search term academic acceleration). From browsing, it seems to me like the research generally shows no significant difference or slight academic improvement among accelerated students, while teachers and administrators still trumpet massive social consequences for advancing students beyond their age level. Some studies even blame this reluctance on the emphasis of average test scores in school ratings and evaluations (you could mess up the class-to-class distribution of test scores by bumping people ahead, I guess). Now, much of the research does also advocate careful selection of candidates for acceleration – presumably if a kid is already markedly socially awkward, overly shy or meek, dropping them into a class of older kids might not work out well.
All I could find so far:
Kraus, P. (1973, March). The accelerated. Gifted Child Quarterly, 17(1), 36-47. Retrieved March 5, 2009, from PsycINFO database.
From the abstract:
I went to secondary school a year early so I was always the youngest. Generally I was ahead in subjects - except maths and I never caught up! Also when I wanted to leave school following my O levels - I found I was still only 15 and had to wait until after my birthday in December and then after that until the Easter after becoming 16.
Essentially the same story here (well, except that I left home and never looked back.)
It was a possibility for me to have skipped a grade somewhere in elementary school. My parents were pretty strongly against it; I was never consulted directly, but remember overhearing some kind of discussion about it in second grade. I should have stood up and asserted myself then… but I just went to the library.
I think the first time I was really aware of a negative impact by NOT skipping a grade was in a freshman college class. A “get to know you” survey asked something about what I expected to learn from the class. I was at a total loss to answer it. There I was, a National Merit Scholar with a 4.1* high school GPA and scholarships from the Academic Decathlon thinking “Why would I expect to learn something at school?”
So when I see this quote in the research someone else posted, I can definitely relate:
Fits me perfectly. I didn’t finish college the first time. I only went back and finished at 30 because it was a necessary step to getting a CPA.
A friend of mine did his doctoral work on studies of boys who had “cusp” birthdays who were held back vs. sent ahead. They wanted to see if the boys did better being the oldest in their class vs. youngest, and if a similar difference would be found in girls in the same situations.
IIRC, they found that the boys who waited an extra year did better (being a bit older than classmates as opposed to a bit younger) but that for girls it didn’t matter at all. Something to do with boys maturing at a different rate?