Treating Students as Gifted Yields Impressive Academic Results, Study Finds
today.duke.edu
today.duke.edu
Educators that have low expectations for certain students will not challenge them and hold them accountable for their work and studies. The student will pick up on this fact. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I'm glad that they are beginning to quantify this piece of common wisdom. Perhaps this will break the bad habits and mindsets of some educators out there.
I wasn't crazy about kids and ended up changing my major to CS. Which is why I'm here! ;)
No wonder the kids who are gifted are going to excel--they have confidence. The "average" kids have already had their dreams crushed. No more art/photography, jazz band, advanced chemistry or computer labs for you! Now all your electives are college readiness programs and that suck the fun out of learning.
I remember honors chemistry at my high school was allowed to do experiments, but regular chemistry wasn't. No wonder the kids in honors chemistry liked chemistry more and were excited to learn. I remember watching my chem teacher taking pure sodium and dropping it in water and watching it explode. The other class had to read out of a textbook.
This hypothesis has been tested and refuted. When identical twins are separated at birth and adopted by different families, they often have wildly different environments. Some go to good schools, some to bad. Some go to families that nurture academic achievement, some to sports families. Nonetheless, the achievement level of one twin is predicted mostly by that of the other twin, not by the adoptive environment. The underlying cause appears to be general intelligence, as measured by IQ.
The effect holds even for highly intelligent people who are diverted from the university track. They simply direct their achievements in other directions.
much further separated than kids of different ethnicities in the same country
No. African-Americans, for example, have an average IQ of 85, very much like an up-market African country. Go read The Bell Curve.
only extremely bad families have a major environmental effect
The siblings in the adoptive families have nearly the full range of accomplishments of the general public. The possible explanations are (1) a sibling's accomplishments are mostly determined by internal causes, or (2) a sibling's accomplishments are substantially influenced by environment, and they experience a wide range of environments (even within the same family).
Other studies use twins raised together. The twins are more similar to each other than to their non-twin siblings, and the differences are explained mostly by IQ. This suggests that accomplishment comes mostly from internal causes.
the environments they were looking at were actually very similar
In terms of opportunity, they are extremely similar by adulthood. In the U.S., annual income at age 30 depends mostly on IQ, regardless of race, ethnicity, and other factors.
[1] http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
By contrast, per capita income explains 46% of variation in average IQ among countries, and even more of the variation in academic performance. (Average academic performance explains over 50% of the variation in average IQ among countries.)
So, does high average income cause people to have high IQs and good academic performance, or the other way around? http://sitemaker.umich.edu/salas.356/more_money__better_grad... documents a study that found children’s academic performance improves when their parents’ income increases.
The TIMSS data you’re citing show the opposite of what you claim them to. The variations in academic achievement between countries are much larger than variations in IQ between ethnicities.
TIMSS doesn’t include a lot of African countries, but of those it does include, 8th-grade achievement in Ghana is 309, in Botswana is 364, in Egypt is 391, and in Tunisia is 420, compared to 508 in the US. The TIMSS scale is normalized so that one standard deviation is 100 points. If we estimated that the 508 score were a weighted average of 85% “white people” and 15% “black people” one standard deviation lower, then the “white people” would be at 523 and the “black people” would be at 423 --- closer to the “white US people” only one s.d. higher than to the Ghanaians 1.14 s.d.s lower. Even Botswana (perhaps the “upmarket” African country you’re thinking of?) would be 0.59 s.d.s below the “black US people”.
(The above breakdown is roughly correct. In the NAEP, the grade 8 mathematics average score for white students in 2009 was 293, the s.d. was 33, and the average for black students was 261, almost exactly one s.d. lower. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/ doesn’t let me link the results, though.)
In general, the TIMSS rankings are much better explained by median income than by average intelligence. The Taiwan average is almost two s.d.s above the international average, which would be like an average IQ of 130, while the Qatar average is almost two s.d.s below, which would be like an average IQ of just over 70, “borderline mentally retarded”. If you’ve ever traveled, it’s obvious that Qatar isn’t actually half populated with mentally retarded people and Taiwan isn’t actually half populated with geniuses.
According to the book you linked, the measured average IQs are 105 for Taiwan and 78 for Qatar.
If you look at this map, you can see how little relationship there is between ethnic composition and national IQ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:National_IQ_Lynn_Vanhanen_... There are enormous differences between Brazil and Congo, between Vietnam and China, between Singapore (which you can’t even see) and Indonesia.
The Bell Curve has been amply debunked already, and in any case is decades out of date.
Correlation is not causation. If race, nutrition, and parasite load (e.g., malaria) are causative factors of IQ (they are!), we would expect per capita income to be highly correlated with IQ. And indeed nutrition and parasites explain why equatorial Africa cranks out hideous poverty and average IQs in the 50s.
The Taiwan average is almost two s.d.s above the international average, which would be like an average IQ of 130, ...
Many Asians place a high priority on math practice, which readily increases ability. Islands of high math accomplishment have been created in the U.S. ghettos when a gifted teacher gives the students a culture transplant.
If you’ve ever traveled, it’s obvious that Qatar isn’t actually half populated with mentally retarded people ...
Mental retardation is actually defined by deficient global neurological abilities: physical coordination, verbal fluency, procedural memory, emotional perception, emotional control, and so forth. In other words, what are called skills of daily living. These talents are partially independent of general intelligence. It is perfectly possible for someone to be friendly, well spoken, and a great cook without having much abstract reasoning ability.
... while the Qatar average is almost two s.d.s below, which would be like an average IQ of just over 70, “borderline mentally retarded”.
Those thresholds were designed for tracking white children into special education classes for developmental disabilities. In a homogenous group, IQ is highly correlated with mental retardation, because global brain damage necessarily reduces IQ. However the thresholds are much less meaningful across races. A white kid with an IQ of 70 will probably need special help to learn to tie their shoes, and will lack the curiosity to care. A black kid with an IQ of 70 is nearly normal except for abstract reasoning ability, and has trainable worker written all over them.
The Bell Curve has been amply debunked already, ...
[citation needed]
Preferably a citation that lets hard data do the talking, looks at all the data, and understands the difference between correlation and causation.
I found this true even as a student in the 'gifted and talented' program through high school and most of middle school. It wasn't until college (and even then only math/science/cs classes) where I was really challenged.
// There's research I've read about here showing that having high expectation worsened exam results. That is if a person was shown that they were good then they performed worse on a subsequent test. If the subject was told that they had tried hard and achieved (in proportion to their effort? can't recall exactly) then they tried hard again.
This appears to contradict the info given here (though it's not a diametric opposition) and contradicts your statement that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm up far too early (no sleep yet, 2½ hours til children are up) but if no one digs it out I'll look for the research. It's had an effect on how I attempt to encourage my kids and on my perception of "praise" too.
This idea, in fact, has been around since the mid 1960's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_Effect Well done to Duke for replicating and publicising it though, as it never seemed to percolate into practice.
In short, praise effort, not intelligence.
Intelligence is vastly overrated and widely misunderstood.
By which I mean, it's not a fixed quantity that an individual has no control over; it is not the same thing as natural aptitude. And responses like "Great job, even though you did poorly on that math test you studied really hard!" are not helpful if you actually want someone to get better. [Note: I'm not saying that "Bad Timmy, you clearly suck at math and I'm giving you an F!" is any better, though unfortunately belief in that false dichotomy is pretty common in the world of education]
When someone "intelligent" gets a bad grade on a math test despite having studied hard, they realize that something is wrong with the way they studied. Or that they have a deficiency in earlier material that they need to correct. Or that they need to sleep more before the test. Etc. They never accept that they didn't work hard enough (they did!), and they never accept that they're not smart enough (they are!) - they assume that they somehow worked wrong, and they set about fixing that problem.
When someone "unintelligent" gets a bad grade on a test, they chalk it up to the fact that they're not very good at math, but hey, they tried hard, and that's what's important, right?
That's not what's important. Learning to work hard is not a worthy goal on its own if you don't learn to work better at the same time (or at least it's not the most worthy goal). This is as true in programming as it is anywhere.
Now, when it comes to child psychology and keeping a child engaged, maybe you're right and it's better to praise effort. But that should not come at the expense of praising intelligence; "intelligence" is the end product of many years of effort directed at the process of learning and thinking, not something that's doled out of a box at birth. Unfortunately it's something that we've never really learned to effectively teach, which is a shame.
[Edit: I'm also not claiming that there's no natural difference in smarts that does come "for free" at birth, there is absolutely some sort of Bell curve happening there, and some people are destined to be at the high and low ends of it, for sure. But my point is that the way the people at the top handle failure is vastly different from the way people at the bottom handle it, in that they're never satisfied with mere effort.]
I agree with you that learning to work hard is not a worthy goal on its own, but the praise effort vs ability debate isn't about encouraging a child to work hard but simply to praise them on what they have control over (their effort) vs their innate abilities.
Now, when it comes to child psychology and keeping a child engaged, maybe you're right and it's better to praise effort. But that should not come at the expense of praising intelligence; "intelligence" is the end product of many years of effort directed at the process of learning and thinking, not something that's doled out of a box at birth.
This idea of praising effort vs ability has been discussed previously here, so instead of repeating it I'll just link to it :)
That makes a lot more sense, and is actually pretty close to what I was getting at (that what's often considered "natural intelligence" is really the end result of a whole lot of hard work aimed at the process of learning instead of the material being learned, and that it's not productive to pretend that one can't influence it).
Dweck's main point is to avoid praising in such a way that it makes kids believe that they're naturally good at something. For example, don't say "You got 100% on that test? You're so good at math!" because that causes kids to believe that they're intrinsically good at math, and that they don't need to continue working at it. The result is that these kids shy away from learning new math, because whenever they encounter math they don't "intrinsically" understand, it violates their "I'm good at math" worldview and makes them feel stupid.
Instead, she suggests praising good results with phrases like "See? You worked hard to solve the problem, and you did it!" - because this encourages the obvious desired behavior that kids see themselves as able to solve problems if they work at them. These kids relish challenges because challenges give them opportunities to validate their worldview - that they're good at figuring out how to solve problems - by solving them.
The aspect of "Learning to work hard is not a worthy goal on its own if you don't learn to work better at the same time" is clearly there, because it's the good results that are praised in both cases. It's just a question of how you praise those good results: don't make the kid think that intelligence is intrinsic - but instead make them think that it can and must be worked at.
(And Dweck doesn't suggest praising poor results, as you suggest with your example "Great job, even though you did poorly on that math test you studied really hard!")
Hope this helps clear things up.
Hope this helps clear things up.
That absolutely does, thank you.
I've always bristled at the idea that poor results should be excused and rewarded as long as effort is expended, which is, on second reading, definitely not what she claims.
There's a fine line, and the goal is having teachers that understand how to properly act in order to influence students to take on the proper mindsets (having a belief in malleable intelligence as one).
No, actually. When a gifted kid has been praised for their intelligence, it is common for them to generalize a failure into a shameful personal defect: they have let everyone down by failing to live up to their Potential. (And with that high IQ they can generalize very well indeed.) This can result into fear and crippling risk aversion, or conversely manic overachievement.
... "intelligence" is the end product of many years of effort directed at the process of learning and thinking, not something that's doled out of a box at birth.
This is crystallized intelligence, specialized knowledge that can be applied to specialized problems. It is indeed the result of long, dedicated study and practice. However it is built on a foundation of fluid intelligence (IQ) which mostly is doled out of a box at birth.
Learning to work hard is not a worthy goal on its own if you don't learn to work better at the same time ... This is as true in programming as it is anywhere.
I think that "work hard" in this context was meant to mean you should depersonalize failure, so that you don't stop working because of shame or worry.
My Kindle reader for Mac won't let me copy and paste, but the following extract from the book is so good that I will type it out:
---------------
While the self-fulfilling prophecy of high expectations is well established by research, in our experience, the most compelling evidence of this idea's power comes from the many testimonials we receive from strong teachers. Crystal Brakke, for example, is a teacher who in her first year teaching eighth grade in Henderson, North Carolina, took her students from almost 70% failing the state literacy assessment to over 80 percent passing it. Ms Brakke shares how her high expectations helped change the academic trajectory of one particularly challenging student.
"The Wilson," the self-appointed nickname of a young man named Scott, was a living legend at Henderson Middle School. He was nearly sixteen years old and had already spent three years at the middle school. The crowds would part in the hallways for him. He ruled the school, and he knew it. He also knew that, probably quite realistically, he would be promoted to high school no matter what he did this school year - we just couldn't keep him in middle school another year. So my second-period class quickly became his personal playground...and I realised that if I didn't do something soon, the year would be lost for both him and the other twenty students I needed to teach...Scott wasn't ready for high school - he was reading at a fifth-grade level.
So I got together with the other teachers on my team, who were facing their own struggles with Scott, and we came up with a plan that was supported by both Scott's grandmother (his guardian) and his older brother, Richard, whom he idolised. We called him into a team meeting, and he sauntered in, ready for whatever we could give him - in-school suspension, after-school detention. He'd seen it all before. Instead, I told him that is schedule had changed: he would now be coming to my class first period and working with the cluster of "gifted and talented" students in that class. Honestly, you could see the color draining from his face. I explained that I realised what the problem was - that it wasn't him; it was me. I wasn't teaching him what he needed; wasn't teaching to his level and expecting from him what I knew he was capable of doing. That's when he just flat out called me "crazy".
But the next day, Scott came to my first-period class. He sat down, and didn't say a word for the next ninety minutes. That's when I knew we were on to something. I can tell you for certain that progress came slowly, very slowly. Some days I had to fight just for him to keep his head up, but then one day, he brought a pen and pencil to class. I almost cried, I was so executed. Another day, he raised his hand to answer a question. He had started participating, and that was the end of behaviour problems with "The Wilson".
By January, he was just another kid in my class and was sharing insights into "Romeo and Juliet" that made my jaw drop. My favourite memory from that year came when one of the seventh-grade teachers approached me after a staff meeting, asking, "What are you doing up there with Scott Wilson?". It turns out "The Wilson" had made a visit to the seventh-grade hallway to chat with some of his old teachers and let them know that we had finally figured it out: he's gifted.
A good teacher can certainly work wonders with students. But it's never as simple as making one change in a vacuum; when I read the anecdote that you've presented, it's pretty clear to me that we're dealing with a good teacher. Even if she's young, she's clearly attentive to the students, and she's smart enough to tailor her approach to best fit what she sees from them.
That's a pretty good sign that she's an exceptional teacher overall - it's a level of attention that you don't often see in schools (it's also one that fades with age, but that's another matter). I'm skeptical that the one technique she happens to credit this particular success to is a silver bullet that would help all students, especially those whose teachers are nowhere near as bright or caring.
Further, having spent some time in the trenches, I'd say a large part of this student's achievement gains are simply due to the fact that he was put in a room with better students, so he was uncomfortable and he fell in line with the way they behaved and acted in the class. That's easy to do for one student, but it's not a trick that scales.
Show me that a simple change in expectations can get an overpacked classroom of 35 disinterested, loud, and sometimes violent C-level students to step up their game and care about Romeo and Juliet (esp. when a sizable percentage of the class can't read at all), and I'll be impressed...
I too had to type things from my kindle to send quotes to friends. Though, never that long. Thanks for the effort!
Works wonders for long passages.
To make sure that YC doesn't get into stupid IP trouble, I took a random snapshot of a public book that I was reading on my PC kindle. Here is the result from google docs:
------- [...] We neighbors are out of bed." This struck the eeuld net then empley him; but I foolishly rest, and we s00n after had offers from one let him kngw as 3 Secret that I 50011 Of them t0 Suppl)’ U5 with 5tE1ti0I1e1"Y; but intended to begin a newspaper, and might as yet we did not chuse to engage in shop then have work him_ My hopes of bL1SiI16SS. success, as I told him, were founded on mention this industry the more this, that the then only newspaper, printed particularly and the more freely, tho’ it by Bradford, was a paltry seems to be talking in my own praise, that wretehedly manag'd, no way entertaining, those of my posterity, who shall read it, and yet was profitable to him;
----
So obviously there are some bugs. The whole thing took me like 1-3 min for the first time. Google docs is kind of slow on my system. No I would still have to correct all the mistakes. No idea of the GP's approach is more work. Still a nice idea.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10RqUDWTGgpZQueJW19QhLxL4...
In second grade, I entered the school's gifted program, and my academics improved greatly. Was it because of the quality of the instruction? No; it primarily consisted of hanging out with a few of the smarter kids in my year, playing computer games, and occasionally learning the names of Roman gods.
Of course, my problems did not disappear either; I still did not fit in with the kids who surrounded me over 90% of the time. It was not until I left my school district for a magnet program that my problems began to disappear and I began to develop ambition (and it still took some time to adjust).
I expect a lot of people will try to interpret these results to say that kids are smart because they went through a gifted program. For me, that's not what happened.3
If true, every company could turn their employees into geniuses by telling them they were. No need for genes, slogans will do the trick.
In other words, more of the same neo-Lysenkoism that was behind "No Child Left Behind". Lysenko maintained that rye could become wheat if people just wanted it enough. In its pop manifestation today, Gladwell similarly maintains that ten thousand hours of training can turn anyone into an expert on anything.
HN readers nod at such articles and then ignore them in real life, hiring the super smart regardless of prior experience.
Only if they were hiring children.
Hard to predict when and how a true egalitarian will allow for biological constraints on their ambitions.
The rather sad, obvious truth here is that _everyone_ could benefit from better teaching - not just the kids with known issues at the top and the bottom.
Note "resources" != "money thrown at the problem". There are plenty of expensive interventions that don't work.
* this will probably provoke the usual hysterical stuff from the self-proclaimed HN geniuses that were terribly bored in school (unlike everyone else, who was, I suppose, riveted).
On the other hand, this economics doesn't work that well in American public schools. They are crippled by teachers' unions which deny performance-based compensation, and funding is seriously skewed toward athletics (though I think in most schools that's funded more by the parents' direct contributions).
(1) How are we measuring "seriously skewed"? Sure the football stadium may have just been remodelled, but how much did that cost relative to other things? (Note that a huge fraction of "school spending" doesn't make it to the school.)
(2) When someone pointed out that he (Babe Ruth) made more than the US president, Ruth replied "I know, but I had a better year than (President Herbert) Hoover."
My point is that the parents may be responding to better performance. I agree that education can be more valuable, but that doesn't imply that spending more is always a good idea. Good money after bad, ROI and all that.
Back then, there was one gifted classroom per grade for the entire school district, and the kids in it were just plain smart. Little 9 year old me, fresh off being hands down the smartest second grader at Audubon Elementary School, was now just about the dumbest kid in class. I could hang with Math, but the reading and writing they were doing in that 3rd grade classroom put me squarely in the remedial group.
Having regular kids in that classroom would have been pure torture for them, and a drain on the rest of the class. Hell, I was a drain on the class at times, and I'd just scored in the 99th percentile on my entrance exams.
I think it's still probably a good idea to split off kids based on ability. This article seems to be more about giving good teachers to everybody, which is certainly a good idea. It just doesn't have any relevance in a discussion about gifted education.
Secondly and in addition, a major part of this study is about the effects various influences have on an individuals' intelligence theories and motivation -- effects of expectations, stereotypes, and also teacher behavior in class. Plenty of studies have shown how various external influences have a massive effect on a students' achievement due to the theory on intelligence they form from these influences.
So I agree giving good teachers to everybody is the solution, however there are definitely other environmental factors involved that complicate the issue. For one, breaking up students into gifted/non-gifted categories adds yet another stereotype that could potentially be harmful to both the non-gifted and gifted students.
I believe the solution would encompass having teachers that understand how these influences affect students, which will give them the capability to structure their classes and their instruction in such a way to dissipate any damage these influences can make, and instead turn them into catalysts for growth.
The "success" in this study is that regular kids in a regular class end with 10% of kids testing for gifted, and regular kids in a "gifted" class show 15-20%. That simply is not that impressive or surprising.
The problem is that good instructors and resources are limited. And while those things would help anyone, you maximize their value by giving them to the kids on the gifted track. We, as a country, would be worse off if we didn't do this because we would be letting the truly talented go to waste in the name of "fairness."
Education is full of big gains promoted to anyone who will listen as the answer to this or that gap - like this one! - which turn out to be flukes (p=0.05 means you just need to keep trying...), statistical or data gaming (what does it really mean to have some specially treated kids reclassified into the gifted program? are the people choosing for the gifted program even blinded as to which kids they are expected to choose and vindicate this expensive program?) and Goodhart's law, regression to the mean or 'fade out', and outright fraud.
like Head Start; there are benefits - and then they fade away: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Head_Start_Pr... or http://edlibertywatch.org/2011/03/studies-on-effectiveness-o... Suppose this study had been conducted in this http://www.ajc.com/news/investigation-into-aps-cheating-1001... recently exposed nest of crime?
Those who are generally considered "gifted" tend to be good at one or a few things. However, each person is likely to be good at a different thing than someone else, so grouping all of these people into the same class can sometimes be pretty pointless.
If you want to maximize the utility of "gifted" students' time in class, you need to give them challenging (but possible) tasks, and then leave them alone.
Put the good teachers in charge of the average-but-gritty[0] students.
Educating students works. Film at 11.
If schools had the resources to give everybody a tailored gifted program, then yeah, America might not suck. Unfortunately, we have other priorities.
Some students are simply smarter than others - and I don't think that's a point anyone can argue. Some debate on different types of learning, and specialized subjects, but from my experience, the gifted students do well in every subject (music/arts an exception). By having more gifted students in a class, it is absolutely inevitable that more time will be spent teaching certain subjects, more clarification will be required, and material will probably need to be dumbed down at least a bit.
While this can create an increase in the pure number of students who reach a certain level, it is unfair to the actually gifted students who require an absolute top level of stimulation.
We've seen that economic communism doesn't work, and I'd bet an arm and a leg that intellectual communism doesn't work either.
I didn't see a word about defining gifted down or watering down the school experience of the "real" gifted students.
I don't think your super stimulative genius level classroom actually exists...
The whole point of this is that the teachers were not special teachers. The students were not special students. But the joint exercise they did was new and interesting. It is more about changing teachers' attitudes and skills than about stratifying resources and kids into gifted and not-gifted.
You might be saying that sea changes are impossible due to entrenched interests in education. I do think some reform there is very important. But I also think that as administrations and states see the benefits for teachers and students, they will start gravitating in this direction.
Most teachers have no awareness of how the petty status games they play in their classrooms deeply impact the performance of their students. Many teachers also don't understand that if they can't communicate an enthusiasm for the subject, then they've failed as educators.
Let me try to better explain what I'm trying to say, as a series of steps:
1. Teachers start treating everyone as smart
2. To treat everyone as gifted, more challenging material has to be introduced.
3. As a result of increased motivation/whatever, the size of the gifted student pool doubles. 80% of the class is still not at a gifted level.
4. No Child Left Behind, morality, failing students, angry parents come into play, and educators are forced to answer questions about the other 80%.
5. Two problems are now in play: First, there is the failing 80%. Second, of the 20% of gifted students, 10% is smarter than the other 10%.
6. Because there can be no tier separation of students (gifted/not gifted), material must be taught the same way, and the same material must be taught (otherwise, discrimination?)
7. Educators have a decision to make: Teach dull material that suits the last 10% and 80%, or teach engaging material that suits the top 10%, but is difficult for the second 10%, and near impossible for the 80%.
8. Choice A results in the top 10% of students losing out on an education, and Choice B results in 80% of the class failing.
9. I hate to bring this up for a very liberal and optimistic audience but: the 20-80 rule is very prevalent in society. It's inevitable that the top 10% will probably account for a good 50% or so of the nation's GDP and innovation when they're older (no, I have no evidence, but it makes sense).
Are you beginning to see my point? I went on a first-date last night, and compared my high school experience (didn't learn a thing, wasn't told about SATs, people were stabbed, no AP/IB) with my date's high school (UTS in Toronto... 2 entrance exams to get in, contests and opportunities made available, etc). I'll tell you now, that I feel like I missed out on a lot of opportunity. By changing education to this model, you'll find more people who feel that way (maybe not as extreme).
PS. My education was so bad, in fact, that by the time I took my SAT II subject tests, I know I needed 800s and I hadn't learned 70% of the material in Math II, Physics, or Chemistry. I bought books, and for the first time in high school, I actually studied.
2. To treat everyone as gifted, more challenging material has to be introduced.
Thank you for the detailed step-by-step reply to the comment above yours. Looking at your first two steps on the basis of international comparisons, I would say that the empirical observation of what happens in countries where step 1 and step 2 are followed is that learners IN GENERAL become smarter and reach higher levels than learners in the United States generally do. I am most familiar with the situation in Taiwan (where my nieces and nephews live, and where my wife grew up and I and my children lived for a time). The international comparative study TIMSS
http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf
shows that the entire bell curve for certain countries is shifted to the right, with "average" level of students in those countries being close to the gifted level in the United States, or, from another point of view, the "gifted" level of the United States being barely above the "average" level of those countries. (See Exhibit 1.1 on pages 34 and 35 of the linked document for a beautiful example of a statistical chart comparing score levels in different countries.)
The international comparisons show that learners rise to higher expectations. Examination of the poor (by international standards) performance of the top students in the United States
http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/
suggests there is plenty of headroom in the United States population that hasn't been explored by the typical United States curriculum. So it is commendable that the researchers mentioned in the submitted link are trying to test the limits of the United States population and see how much academic performance can increase here, as it has in other countries I know during my lifetime.
Why? I see no logical reason for this to be the case. I know in my elementary and middle school the gifted programs were actually easier than regular classes, and I would assume that this is actually fairly common if not the norm. John Taylor Gatto talks a lot about treating his kids like they're gifted, and if anything his classes seem much easier than normal too. (He doesn't actually believe that more than a tiny percent of kids are really gifted, but AFAIK the way he treats them is basically in line with what most education theorists who advocate this would endorse.)
There are two independent factors here:
1.a. Assuming the students have a high IQ.
1.b. Assuming the students can benefit from being like and paid attention to.
If you actually read the article, you find that they are talking entirely about 1.b. One of the student groups is African, so they have a mean IQ around 85. Vanishingly few of them are going to be studying calculus prep at age 13 (option 1.a.). They also explicitly state that they are teaching using techniques used for gifted classes, not the subject material.
So what they are really doing is moving kids out of warehouses and putting them in actual, you know, schools. Amazingly it turns out that an average IQ of 85 is enough to learn useful things.
These "results" also depends of:
Animated or depressive mood of teachers (private schools vs. ghetto schools).
Conditions of classrooms (illumination, cleanness, colors of walls, furniture).
The dress of the teachers.
Male/female students ratio.
Location of the school (suburbs vs. city).
Noise level (traffic outside, etc).
Weather (season) and time of day (morning/evening classes).
btw, It is much more important to emphasize the harmful effect of the parent's violence, childhood abuses and other negative feedback which is just a mirror image of observed phenomena known for centuries.
Would I have excelled in a "gifted" program? Probably, provided the material wasn't so trivial, dull, and repetitive. Would everyone benefit from a significantly increased difficulty? I'm not so sure.
Holding students to a high standard, and taking time to engage with them such that you earn their respect will of course raise student performance. However, applying the word "gifted" en masse simply dilutes the earlier meaning of the word.
It's v. unscientific I know but it's an interesting observation all the same.