A Special Program for Highly Able Rural Youth in Grades Five and Six

Abstract

There are many barriers to appropriate programming for highly gifted students in rural schools. This paper describes an attempt to overcome these barriers. Twp New York State County Boards of Cooperative Services (B.O.C E.S.) cooperated to begin a program for 32 fifth and sixth grade academically advanced students from 19 schools covering 2600 square miles. The local schools sent students one full day a week to one of five sites for advanced level study in humanities and science.Objective and subjective evaluation indicated that the model was successful. Now in its third year, serving 130 students, this model may serve as one approach for small, rural, geographically distant schools. Barriers to ProgramsThere have been at least three barriers to meaningful educational challenges for highly gifted students in rural schools. One has been the assumption that high level academic giftedness rarely exists in rural, sparsely populated areas. Because &dquo;rural&dquo; is often associated with &dquo;disadvantaged&dquo; or &dquo;impoverished&dquo; (Lewis, 1982), children from rural areas are assumed to be academically deficient. The second is that even if a case of unusual academic talent were uncovered, a school would not have the resources to educate that student properly (Carmichael, 1982). A third, more subtle barrier has been the assumption that if &dquo;gifted&dquo; services are to be offered by a school, they should be available to a relatively large number of their students (e.g., all those with above average abilities). The result is that the special needs of the small number of highly able children are often overlooked.In schools where gifted/talented programs do exist, quite often the program consists of enrichment activities within the regular classroom or a pull-out situation in which students meet for as little as one or two hours per week. An accelerated or advanced level curriculum is rarely adopted because teachers often lack the training in a specific discipline to provide appropriate accelerated learning (Dunne, 1977; Moore & Wood, 1988). The result is that a truly differentiated curriculum at a high level is difficult for many schools to provide.The consequences of these barriers and programmatic compromises are that highly gifted children rarely receive appropriate educational experience (Lewis, 1982;Spicker, Southern, & Davis, 1987). With this in mind, three years ago, four counties in upstate New York requested their intermediate unit (the Board of Cooperative Educational Services or BOCES) to identify and provide advanced level instruction to highly able elementary students. These counties are situated in a rural setting with large distances separating schools. In addition, the economic climate in these counties is weak.During the previous 10 years, the BOCES had actively encouraged the hiring of a teacher for the gifted or an enrichment teacher in each of the school districts on a shared or full-time basis. The BOCES also offered enrichment minicourses during and after school on a wide variety of ...

Cognitive and Affective Learning Outcomes of Gifted Elementary School Students

“…Goldring (1990) concluded that there were no differences in self-concept for students in separate classes when compared with those in regular classes. Likewise, Vaughn et al (1991), Aldrich and Mills (1989), and Van Tassel-Baska et al (1989) found similar results for their analyses of students in pullout programs.…”

The effect of grouping and program type on scholastic and affective outcomes in the Mawhiba schools partnership initiative

“…Goldring (1990) concluded that self-perception did not differ between students in separate classes and students in regular classes. Similar results were found in some studies of students in pull-out programs (Aldrich and Mills, 1989; VanTassel-Baska et al, 1989; Vaughn et al, 1991). However, in another study, students in a pull-out program were found to have significantly higher mean self-perception scores relative to their elementary and middle school counterparts (Feldhusen et al, 1990).…”

“…By contrast, other studies found that students in a gifted program exhibited greater academic performance than did gifted students not enrolled in such a program (Aldrich and Mills, 1989; Reis et al, 1993; Roberts, Ingram, and Harris, 1992). However, self-perception did not differ between treatment and control students in one study (Lynch and Mills, 1990).…”

Examining the Effects of Gifted Programming in Mathematics and Reading Using the ECLS-K

“…The limited research using a comparison group and some adjustment for selection bias to study the effects of gifted programming on upper elementary students’ reading and mathematics achievement or attitudes has produced mixed results. For instance, Aldrich and Mills (1989), Delcourt et al (2007), Reis et al (1993), and Roberts, Ingram, and Harris (1992) found higher achievement for students in a gifted program compared with other gifted students. In specific content areas, VanTassel-Baska, Zuo, Avery, and Little (2002) and Gavin, Casa, Adelson, Carroll, and Sheffield (2009) found higher literature and mathematics achievement, respectively, when high-end curriculum was used, particularly in self-contained settings.…”