A friend (who’s studying to be an elementary school teacher) and I were talking about ability grouping for elementary school students, which they’re now apparently being told not to do. The evidence they’ve been given for this recommendation by textbooks and professors has been mostly anecdotal,…
You might be interested in this Boston Globe article from last year, which talks about the problem of dedicating resources to high ability kids.
Thanks for sharing, it’s nice that the Globe recognizes that this is a thing (although of course it has to be framed not as “smart people will make the world a better place” but as “smart people will help us compete against Asia”)
In one of the studies, the Vanderbilt researchers matched students who skipped a grade with a control group of similarly smart kids who didn’t. The grade-skippers, it turned out, were 60 percent more likely to earn doctorates or patents and more than twice as likely to get a PhD in science, math, or engineering.
Interesting. (Controlling for SAT scores makes me happy, though it seems likely there’s other stuff that would confound this–like grade-skipping children may be more confident or proactive.)