Online degree, online education, part 6.

A Model for Academic Acceleration
It is important to see academic acceleration not as a single intervention but rather as an ongoing, holistic, whole-school process necessarily involving the student, the student's caregivers, and his or her teachers.
Accordingly, Peter Merrotsy has developed an acceleration model that recommends six steps toward a better curriculum for gifted students: identification, communication, a negotiated curriculum, academic acceleration, access to advanced courses while still at school, and support.
Identification
Identification of a gifted student should imply that educational action will take place. It needs to be remembered that identification is notoriously unreliable, especially for gifted students from a background of disadvantage (e.g., low socioeconomic status or forced cultural minority status). That is one of the reasons why it is important to have a broad, inclusive curriculum and to have students involved in making decisions about getting online degree.
Communication
Each gifted student has a right to know the curriculum options and pathways to earn online bachelor degree available to him or her. Information about enrichment programs, extracurricular activities, meeting outcomes in alternative ways, high-level courses, senior courses, academic acceleration, and access to advanced-level courses online degree while still at school should be clearly communicated to gifted students, and indeed to all students and their caregivers.
A Negotiated Curriculum
Gifted students are in a position to make informed decisions about their education. They should be actively involved in decision-making processes concerning their curriculum. Gifted students should be empowered to negotiate their curriculum.
Academic Acceleration
Academic acceleration appears to be the best and most feasible method for providing a challenging, rewarding, and continuous education which matches a gifted student's academic ability and comes closest to meeting his or her educational—intellectual, social, and emotional—needs. In order to earn online bachelor degree it may be necessary to change the organization of the school's curriculum and, in some cases, to change systemic policy.
Advanced-Level Courses
Access to advanced-level courses while still at school is an appropriate and natural progression for a gifted student who has academically accelerated. It is important to remember that an accelerated student could choose instead to study a greater number of secondary subjects, complete fewer secondary subjects but in greater depth, or take a year off, perhaps as an exchange student in another country. Whichever option is pursued, careful long-term planning, clear communication, and a negotiated curriculum are needed.
Support for Gifted Students
To help their intellectual, social, and emotional development, academically accelerated students need appropriate support, in terms of policy, administration, coordination of courses, enriched educational experiences, access to high-level courses, access to specialist teachers, tutors, counselors and mentors, and resources. In particular, gifted students from dis-advantaged backgrounds, and from rural and isolated settings, need financial support so that they have access to resources and to educational experiences and opportunities enjoyed by others.
Guidelines for online bachelor degree
The Iowa Acceleration Scale offers a thoughtful and careful objective guide for whole-grade, academically accelerated progression and is supported by research and many repetition studies. There are four critical items: If a student's measured IQ is below 120, if a sibling is either in the same grade from which the student will accelerate or in the new grade to which the student will accelerate, or there is any antipathy by the student, then whole-grade acceleration is not recommended. School history; an assessment of ability, aptitude, and achievement; academic and developmental factors; interpersonal skills; and attitude and support by the school and family are then taken into account in order to give, or not give, as the case may be, a recommendation for whole-grade acceleration. If whole-grade acceleration is not recommended, then advice is available on the suitability of other forms of acceleration or on enrichment and extension online degree programs.

Ongoing Issues
Two key issues need to be addressed worldwide if gifted students are to gain adequate access to a curriculum that includes options for online bachelor degree. These issues need to be addressed to overcome the impact of social and cultural disadvantage and to give equity of access to appropriate educational programs for gifted students.
First, the findings of research concerning the academic and affective benefits of well-administered acceleration online bachelor degree programs need to be accepted by educational administrators, communities, and teachers. System-organizational patterns of social grouping and the lockstep method of promotion constitute an effective barrier to the development of giftedness, suggesting the deep and urgent need for more flexible forms of school organization that ensure continuity of experience based on criteria other than age or years of attendance and that permit student progression based on individual development and performance.
Second, the end result or consequence of acceleration must be appropriately supported and managed by the education system. For example, with respect to advanced-level subjects studied while still at school, clarification is needed concerning equity of access, which can only be maintained through flexible forms of delivery and alternative modes of study; recognition that they constitute a formal component of secondary school studies, with continuity and articulation of curriculum; the status of secondary students who have completed advanced level units of studies, inter alia that they are still eligible for university entrance scholarships; and credit transfer.
Peter Merrotsy


EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

Online degree, part 4. ACCELERATION.

The classical understanding of the term acceleration is progress through an educational program at a rate faster, or at an age younger, than conventional. This is now referred to, more appropriately, as academic acceleration and is based on the premise that each child has a right to realize his or her potential.
Academic acceleration is valid pedagogy, is grounded in and supported by research, and is an appropriate response to the educational and social needs of a student whose cognitive ability and academic achievement are several years beyond those of their age-peers. Yet worldwide it is an educational option little used. Even though the research on acceleration is so uniformly and distinctly positive and the benefits of well-administered acceleration are so unequivocal, educators are reluctant to accelerate children, and some educational systems proscribe its transparent use.
This entry presents an outline of current theory of academic acceleration through a discussion of a curriculum for gifted students, the benefits of acceleration, a model for acceleration, guidelines for implementing an acceleration program, and ongoing issues related to the practice of acceleration.
Curriculum for Gifted Students
The literature is adamant: Gifted students are exceptional students who have three basic educational needs. They require the provision of a curriculum that is substantially and qualitatively differentiated; that is prescribed, planned, articulated, permanent, ongoing, and defensible; that is based on students' exceptionality; and that is predicated on the needs of each student. Gifted students require accelerated, enriched, and challenging learning experiences, with carefully planned, relevant enrichment and with content acceleration to the level of each student's ability. They also require counseling and guidance to foster cognitive and affective growth. Whereas most teachers and researchers involved with the education of gifted students agree that gifted students do require a differentiated curriculum, there is passionate debate concerning the form that this provision should take.
Counseling certainly is important for the social and emotional development of the gifted student and should be part of the framework for any program devised for gifted students.
Academic enrichment is worthwhile for most students and should not be offered to gifted students only. Relevant academic enrichment requires the provision of a program specifically designed for the individual. For gifted students, this will naturally entail advanced material and higher-level treatment of topics within their area of special aptitude, and the more relevant and excellent the enrichment is, the more it calls for acceleration of subject matter or grade placement later. Indeed, acceleration may well be the most appropriate form of enrichment.
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The notion of academic acceleration is evidently contentious, with an enormous hiatus existing between what research has revealed and what most practitioners believe and do. The literature uniformly emphasizes that academic acceleration should form an integral component of a school's program for gifted students, complementing enrichment programs and provisions and following relevant enrichment. Resistance to academic acceleration, especially through concerns for the social and emotional development of the accelerated student, is not grounded in research. Clearly, educators need to be aware of the empirical research on the positive effects of academic acceleration. Moreover, the literature carefully points out that academic acceleration appears to be the best and most feasible method for providing a challenging, rewarding, and ongoing education that matches a gifted student's academic and intellectual ability and comes closest to meeting his or her educational, social, and emotional needs.
Whatever the status of the debate, if service delivery is predicated on a gifted student's precocious development and educational needs, then a differentiated curriculum should be challenging and educationally relevant and should be adapted by acceleration, enrichment, sophistication, and novelty. Such an eclectic approach to programming for the gifted will be employed within an integrative framework, adaptable to the cognitive and affective needs of the individual.
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The issue may be placed in perspective by cor-rectly noticing that a gifted student is already accelerated and that what is accelerated through academic acceleration is simply the student's progress through the formal school curriculum. The key point is that matching the curriculum to the student's abilities is not acceleration per se, but rather it is a developmentally appropriate teaching practice.

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.