‘Nobody asks me about it’: gifted kids short-changed by acceleration programs

ACU education lecturer and researcher Dr Gavin Smith-Pill canvassed the perspectives of 21 primary students attending accelerated learning programs across six schools, finding widespread confusion and a host of other issues emerged from the data.

“Nowhere in the world could I find information about whether the children that go to these lessons actually felt that their needs were being met – and that was my starting point.

“We weren’t listening to the children. There’s heaps of research talking to the teachers, maybe talking to some secondary kids about whether being in a WAO (withdrawal acceleration option) increases their marks.

“Nobody was talking to the primary children,” Smith-Pill, himself a former teacher, tells EducationHQ.

Missing the mark

The researcher says the study’s findings were ‘really surprising’.

For starters, children reported often being handed worksheets that failed to target their individual strengths or learning needs.

“There was the sense that all participants felt unsure why they were just getting largely photocopied worksheets from older year levels or tests – they were consistently getting tests from older class levels.

“So, if you were in Grade 3, you were getting a Grade 5 NAPLAN test.

“And it’s just happening again and again, without that teacher saying, ‘Well OK, you’re really good at this particular style of problem solving, or you’re very good at art, or you’re very good at coding, or you’re very good at fractions … I’ll give you this targeted intervention, with quality teaching’,” Smith-Pill laments.

The expert suggests that schools are developing WAOs without the support of data or a universal policy to inform their structure.

He says in some cases, schools were giving accelerated maths lessons to children gifted in writing and vice versa, with no scope for student choice.

Sessions were also delivered sporadically, leaving children unsure of when they would next be removed from class.

“They weren’t delving into the academic or emotional or social needs of the children…”

Many students also felt confused about how and why they had been selected for the WAO, Smith-Pill flags.

“Five per cent of my students knew and they guessed. Their teachers never told them ... they were unclear about why other people that seemed to be really capable in class weren’t chosen.”

Ambivalence abounds

One quarter of students reported that their class teacher was disconnected or disinterested in their WAO progress, because they had not been informed of it.

“I don’t know whether they actually know what we do, but I think that they think we’re way smarter than them, and we’re going off to do this class to do hard work, but that’s all they know,” one student noted.

“The class teacher doesn’t know anything about what we do… we do completely different things our teacher doesn’t get told about,” another reported.

Accelerated students also felt their parents and peers were ‘ambivalent’ about their WAO experience, the research found.

“The schools were advocating for these programs, but there was a sense in some of the children that ‘OK, I’m going to this program, I don’t know why, the teacher doesn’t mark my work, nobody asks me about it – not even my parents ask me about it, so where is the pay off for me?’

“Which is a real shame because they were hoping to go there and really flex their intellectual muscle,” Smith-Pill says.

Despite broader criticisms around the potential harm caused by separating gifted children from their regular classroom, Smith-Pill says students in the study were grateful for the opportunity to extend their learning.

“In their classrooms, they’re recognised as the dominant learners, and so they get motivation from that, and they have a really tight connection with the teacher.

“Gifted children aren’t the same as every other child, they have a different psychology, they have fixations and then they form very tight and emotional bonds with their teachers.

“Usually, if you’re taking them away, they feel discomfort.”

Dr Gavin Smith-Pill is calling for a national policy for primary schools that provides a ‘uniform measure of giftedness’.

Land of the Tall Poppy

Experts in the field of gifted education have warned previously of what they say is the continued systemic neglect of Australia’s high potential and gifted students.

Dr Michelle Ronksley-Pavia, an expert in giftedness and twice-exceptionality from Griffith University, has called out the lack of federal government direction for supporting gifted students or for tapping into their potential.

“Where policies do exist at state and territory levels, they often languish on websites but aret  noimplemented or ‘enforced’, or surprisingly are removed altogether and subsumed in inclusive education policies that lack specific direction for schools in supporting these learners,” Ronksley-Pavia told EducationHQ earlier this year.

The academic said she was frequently approached by schools who “recognise that their high potential and gifted students are languishing, disengaged in classrooms across the country”.

“These schools recognise they need to be doing better for these students but lack the skill or training to be able to nurture this potential,” she added.

Smith-Pill says that when it comes to assessing our provision of gifted education on the world stage, Australia is “a little bit lacking”.

“We live in the country of the tall poppy, [where we see] these children are already advantaged, they are intellectually superior – and we’re not understanding the psychology of the gifted child, which is different.”

Smith-Pill is calling for a national policy for primary schools that provides a ‘uniform measure of giftedness’. He says we need a “definitive pathway” for identifying and then educating gifted children.

“Because these are the children that are going to find the cures to diseases, they’re going to be creating the laws that make our lives better, inventing things that benefit the world … it’s always gifted people that [do these things because they have] intellectual superiority,” he says.

“Nobody stubs their toe accidentally and creates the iPhone. It was somebody who had a high degree of fixation, of passion for research, of being able to identify what needs to be done and how to do it…”

Estimates of how many gifted students are underachieving in schools vary from 10 to 50 per cent, which translates to anywhere between 40,000 and 200,000 students nationally.

Smith-Pill warns that we don’t actually know how many gifted children sit in classrooms around the country.

“We use old procedures from the 1970s as a rough guide for what we’re looking at.

“So, we need to have an audit of what schools are doing to identify and support them.

“And then we certainly need a strategy, a policy that says, ‘This is an important issue – this is what we need to do find these children so we can maximise our impact in helping them’.”