Room for Debate: Gifted Tracks
The New York Times has an excellent series of articles called Room for Debate where they have various experts write an essay for or against a subject. Their latest is about gifted education . I didn't read each article thoroughly but two things did stand out. Professor Bruce Sacerdote had this to say: My paper with fellow economists James West and Scott Carrell examines peer effects among students at the Air Force Academy. We found that students benefit from their peers, but that these peer effects disappear if the group is comprised of the highest ability and lowest ability cadets. My work with economists Scott Imberman and Adriana Kugler examines peer effects from the arrival of Hurricane Katrina refugees in receiving schools. We discovered that high ability students benefit the most from high ability peers. And an experiment in primary schools in Kenya, researchers found that grouping students into classrooms based on prior achievement benefits al...