Accelerated Learning
At various points in their schooling, children are usually required by the school system to take various types of standardized academic performance tests. These standardized tests are taken by all children within a target peer group, usually divided according to age and grade.
These tests are also used as a likely indicator of each student’s future academic performance, by measuring each student against a regional and/or national academic average, and isolating the students who are remedial as well as advanced.
These standardized tests are intended to measure how well students are doing in school and how accurately they have understood the curriculum as it has been taught up to that point in their schooling. The tests are good indicators of future performance to a certain point. Certainly those students who excel at these types of tests, whether they be IQ tests or general academic performance tests, usually go on to do very well in their academic endeavors and are generally considered the clever or “advanced” students. The students who rank as average or below average, however, will usually go on to perform only adequately, or sometimes less than adequately.
What are the shortcomings of regular IQ and academic testing in schools?
The shortcomings of these tests as indicators of future professional success are therefore not often evident until after students have graduated and begun to work in the “real world”. When this happens, though, the students who did very well academically may find they are no longer as “exceptional” as they once were, since the requirements of daily life are not limited to the strictly academic. They may end up in a middle-management position somewhere, and although they will not technically be failures, they will not necessarily be the success stories that their above average academic tests indicated they could be. In contrast, the “Average” students may very well go on to excel in their chosen field for the same reason that the exceptional students do not. Professional fields are not always academic in nature, so students who did poorly to average in academic endeavors in school may find they are suddenly much more adept at various tasks not included in the standardized performance tests.
The failure of these standardized academic performance tests accurately to measure learning progress as well as future learning ability is explained by their very narrow focus. They measure students solely on one facet of their learning ability while the real world tests them on a variety of levels, often allowing them to find a niche not previously available to them in school.
How does accelerated learning help students when regular academic testing fails?
Unlike the more traditional standardized methods of testing academic performance, teaching based on the principles of accelerated learning techniques will benefit students on a variety of levels when it comes to promoting a wide range of learning abilities. The accelerated learning techniques will focus on drawing out the many different talents and aptitudes of the students, and by doing this the accelerated learning principles allow educators to target the specific ways in which each individual student best acquires and retains knowledge.
By applying the principles of accelerated learning to their teaching methods, educators will better be able to determine the individual learning strengths and weaknesses of every student, rather than those certain few students who happen already excel in an academic setting. Then, by focusing on accelerating the learning abilities of all these children, schools as a whole will be much better able to educate and prepare all varieties of students for academic life as well as the professional lives that they will face afterward.
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