Radical Acceleration: Adding to Your Human-Centered Parenting Toolbox

By Dr. Lin Lim

Parenting has been the most humbling and fulfilling journey in my past 18 years, learning to see the unique constellations that make up our daughter and son. Both have IQs in the profoundly gifted range, and yet they could not be more different. The research is sparse regarding this group and even more lacking for minority culture groups (Gross, 2006) and gender (Stanley, 1978; 1985).

Coming from an Asian country with a nationalized education system, parenting in the United States is freeing and overwhelming at the same time due to the multitude of choices. Between my two children, we have experienced a wide gamut of schooling in the past 13 years: private gifted, private schooling for students with learning differences, public gifted, public special education, subject acceleration, homeschooling, community college, and radical acceleration (residential university setting). This article will discuss our experience specifically with our daughter, as females are under-represented in the world of radical acceleration.

Radical acceleration is defined within academic literature as schooling that is three or more years ahead of same-age peers (Stanley, 1978). Researchers advocate for radical acceleration as an effective intervention for highly intellectually gifted students (IQ 160+) with high motivation (Stanley, 1991), and mature social-emotional development (Gross, 2006),  in addition to requiring careful monitoring and planning. 

Our daughter is interested in art, reasoning, math, building, and logic, and when she was in 5th grade, we moved her to a private school to bypass the 2-year subject acceleration limit placed by our public school. Returning back to public school in 6th grade, she was "allowed" to be accelerated 3 grades in math as a transfer student.

We ended up homeschooling in 8th grade with plans to return to our public high school after seeing the hallowing of her being. During the year of homeschooling, our daughter took several classes at our local community college and also engaged in interest-based learning, including joining a math club. She lit up from within that year and we began a journey to find community, belonging, and wellness connected to her interest areas and through the radical acceleration of skipping over high school and beginning college. This human-centered approach places the whole person, with their unique attributes and individualized development, in relationships and care for others and the world with the goal of living a rich fulfilling life at school and beyond (Gill & Thomson, 2017).

Radical acceleration was a “fast pass” in our search for others with similar interests and a safe space for our daughter to master other non-academic life skills within a residential setting with onsite supervision and care. In other words, how you utilize (radical) acceleration as a bridge, tool, or scaffold, versus as an end goal, is an important consideration often overlooked. The unique dimensions of your child, such as learning, personality, temperament, interests, strengths, social emotions, motivation, and sensory and relational orientations, all interact as a whole. 

The more skills your child needs to acquire in tandem with academic acceleration, the less successful the strategy may be. Various researchers have investigated this zone for optimal learning and may refer to it using different terms. I find the 15% error rate (Wilson et al., 2019) that optimizes the learning difficulty level and maximizes learning to be most helpful. This theory suggests that aiming for understanding or performance at about 85% of your potential allows for a balance, encourages progress, and avoids burnout.

Radical acceleration was a bridge toward different goals for our daughter, therefore the error rate of learning had to be lower overall to balance out other areas of skill acquisition. There are a myriad of types of acceleration, including single or multiple subjects, whole grade skips, and moving to subjects not typically available to children of a certain age or grade (ie: business, economics, psychology, and 3d modeling). 

If radical acceleration, private school, and homeschooling are not possible for your family, work with your local public schools to find out what acceleration options are available within the system.  Additionally, it is important to monitor and adjust the acceleration plan with your child’s feedback to stay within the dynamic zone over time.  As we move into the new school year, I encourage you to try acceleration, including radical acceleration if appropriate, either as a tool or goal using the 15% error rate as a starting point.  You will be amazed at how your child responds and grows, just as we have been.

References

Gill, S., & Thomson, G. (2017). Human-centred Education: A practical handbook and guide. Routledge.

Gross, M. U. M. (2006). Exceptionally Gifted Children: Long-Term Outcomes of Academic Acceleration and Nonacceleration. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 29(4), 404–429. https://doi.org/10.4219/jeg-2006-247

Stanley, J. (1978). Radical Acceleration: Recent Educational Innovation At JHU. Gifted Child Quarterly, 22, 62-67. https://doi.org/10.1177/001698627802200117

Stanley, J. C. (1985). Finding Intellectually Talented Youths and Helping Them Educationally. The Journal of Special Education, 19(3), 363–372. https://doi.org/10.1177/002246698501900312

Stanley, J. C. (1991). Critique of “Socioemotional Adjustment of Adolescent Girls Enrolled in a Residential Acceleration Program.” The Gifted Child Quarterly, 35(2), 67–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/001698629103500203

Wilson, R.C., Shenhav, A., Straccia, M. & Cohen, J. (2019). The Eighty Five Percent Rule for optimal learning. Nature Communications, 10, 4646. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12552-4

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Lin Lim holds a doctorate in human development psychology (Boston University), an Academic Graduate Certificate in Mind, Brain, and Teaching (Johns Hopkins University), and Twice-exceptional Education (Bridges Graduate School of Cognitive Diversity in Education). Her parenting journey with her complex outlier children has led to her current interdisciplinary academic interest and focus on synthesizing cultural, attitudes, and conceptual thinking around extreme complex outliers into practical applications. She is an international presenter and keynote speaker on topics including education, diversity, twice-exceptionality, giftedness, interdisciplinary social science, human development, and psychology. She is active in gifted-related diversity equity awareness and advocacy. She is a Dean at Bridges Graduate School of Cognitive Diversity in Education, founder of a non-profit Quark Collaboration Institute, served as President at SENG 2021-2023, and currently serves as the immediate past president at SENG. LinkedIn.com/in/linlimgoh