Gifted students can benefit from skipping grades (“acceleration”) and from being grouped with peers with similar skills (“ability grouping”), finds a meta-analysis in the Review of Educational Research. Researchers reviewed 125 studies on acceleration and 172 on ability grouping, spanning 100 years of research. They found that gifted students who skipped a grade outperformed their non-accelerated peers. Gifted students also benefited from most types of ability grouping: Within-class grouping helped them (breaking one classroom into smaller work groups based on ability), as did cross-grade subject grouping (grouping students from different grade levels together to learn a particular subject). However, between-class grouping (assigning students into high-average-or low-ability classrooms) did not provide a benefit.

Susie Bean Gives