A Study of Rapid Acceleration in the Elementary School

Much has been written in the past decade in regard to the acceleration of pupils in the elementary school. A great deal of the acceleration in the school systems of the smaller communities has been accomplished by the skip-grade or double-promotion method. Even though this method has been used by many, little has been done to determine the actual results of such acceleration. The present study1 is an attempt to supply this need. The data used as a basis were the teachers' marks of 22 pupils of the elementary school of Monticello, Indiana, and the correspond ing marks of all the pupils of all the groups to which these pupils belonged. Each of the pupils had been accelerated by being taken from a grade and placed in the next higher grade, thereby skipping one full grade of school work. Before acceleration these pupils were scattered through ten groups of children and after accelera tion they belonged to ten other groups. The groups ranged in size from 14 to 70 so that a total of 696 pupils was involved in the investigation. By making comparisons of the standings of each of the 22 accelerated pupils in from three to five subjects, before and after skipping a grade, it was necessary to use 3,211 averages of teachers' marks or more than 10,000 monthly grades. In this manner 101 subject standings before double promotion and 101 corresponding subject standings after double promotion were se cured for comparison. In order to compare the standings already referred to, it was desirable to express each in standard units of measure. This was done by expressing each in standard-deviation or sigma (o-) units derived from the arithmetic means of the teachers' marks of each group in each subject. There are 101 such standings before double