Wallace Research Symposium

Wallace Research Symposium, April 29-May 1, 2018: The premier research symposium in gifted education.

The Acceleration Institute

The Acceleration Institute endorses academic acceleration as the most effective intervention for academically talented students.

The Acceleration Institute serves educators, parents, students, administrators, policy makers, state directors, and anyone who would like information about the benefits of acceleration. The Acceleration Institute provides support for acceleration in three key ways:

Research

A Nation Deceived is the 2004 watershed report by Drs. Nicholas Colangelo, Susan Assouline, and Miraca Gross that highlights disparities between the research on acceleration and the educational beliefs and practices that often run contrary to the research. In 2015, the Belin-Blank Center released a new report on acceleration. A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America’s Brightest Students revealed that many productive activities concerning educational acceleration occurred during the previous 11 years. Unfortunately, however, acceleration is still underutilized as an educational intervention for gifted students. A Nation Empowered provides additional compelling evidence about the success of acceleration, including longitudinal studies.

Implementation for making acceleration decisions

IDEAL Solutions® for STEM Acceleration is a web-based system to determine readiness for acceleration in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects for 3rd-7th graders.

The Iowa Acceleration Scale (3rd ed.) is an objective decision-making guide to help a child-study team consider a K-8 student’s readiness for grade-based acceleration.

Policy

Guidelines for Developing an Academic Acceleration Policy offers recommendations for developing or revising an acceleration policy.

Visit the Acceleration Institute website to see all the available resources on acceleration: links to state acceleration policies, an annotated bibliography of research articles, stories of acceleration, a PowerPoint presentation on acceleration, and more.