If you want your child to be gifted at school, treat them as if they are gifted. This simplistic approach has yielded surprising results in several school districts that have been testing this hypothesis.
The U.S. Department of Education has studied a program in North Carolina called Project Bright Idea [1] that followed 10,000 kindergarten through second-grade students who traditionally would not have had access to gifted programs over a period of five years. The program, which was a collaboration between Duke University researchers and various school districts across North Carolina, helped train teachers to expect more from their classrooms - by treating students as gifted, regardless of their gender, socioeconomic status, or race.
The results of Project Bright Idea are encouraging [2]. Based on independent assessments of the program's results, 15-20% of the kids who participated in the gifted classroom study were categorized as intellectually "gifted" after a period of three years; prior to Project Bright Idea, only 10% of the schools' students were eligible for this distinction. These results are encouraging, and especially so in low-income school districts where some schools had no kids included in gifted programs.
By focusing on the quality of the curricula, instead of who should or should not be considered gifted, Project Bright Idea has shown that many kids are capable of so much more. By expecting our kids to perform at a higher level, we set a precedent and a way of thinking that many kids respond to positively.
The Peaksmart team sees this in the results of many of our students. Peaksmarters are not restrained from tackling more challenging work than what they would typically encounter at school. In fact, a handful of topics in each Peaksmart grade are advanced (beyond NCTM or Common Core standards) in order to challenge our students and give them a taste of what is awaiting them in the next grade level. Of course, the Peaksmart adaptive algorithms take care to introduce these topics gradually and ensure that the student is at the appropriate level of difficulty at all times.
The Peaksmart team sees this in the results of many of our students. Peaksmarters are not restrained from tackling more challenging work than what they would typically encounter at school. In fact, a handful of topics in each Peaksmart grade are advanced (beyond NCTM or Common Core standards) in order to challenge our students and give them a taste of what is awaiting them in the next grade level. Of course, the Peaksmart adaptive algorithms take care to introduce these topics gradually and ensure that the student is at the appropriate level of difficulty at all times.
The Peaksmart team is inspired by the results of Project Bright Idea and we applaud the team behind it as well as all the teachers that made it a reality. We're excited to be able to provide math enrichment tools for teachers and parents that help them treat their students as gifted in math.
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