Journal of Advanced Academics

This article describes a grant-funded effort to improve the lives of academically able middle and high school students living in rural poverty. The program, Project Aspire, attempts to increase the number of these children in the most rigorous math and science coursework available in their schools. To that end, Project Aspire assists 14 school corporations by helping faculty in those settings increase the level of rigor of their courses and by offering Advanced Placement (AP) courses through multiple platforms of distance education technologies.

A primary component of the project is the attempt to assist the school counselors’ work with their students, in hopes that the students’ lives will be improved. To prepare the counselors, ongoing training has been provided. This paper reports an analysis of the ideas and experiences shared during the lengthy training sessions with 21 school counselors. From the analysis and a literature review, the authors offer in three tables concise information for effectively working with high-ability middle and high school students living in rural poverty.

This study sought to determine whether honors college students differed with regards to academic achievement, academic self-concept, general self-concept, educational aspirations, and career aspirations as a function of their class standing. Participants included 298 honors college students from a large, Midwestern university. A demographic questionnaire, the general academic subscale and the general-self subscale of the Self-Description Questionnaire III (Marsh & O'Neill, 1984), and the Leadership and Achievement Aspirations subscale of the Career Aspirations Scale (O'Brien, 1992) were used. Results indicate significant differences between juniors and seniors with regards to academic self-concept, educational aspirations, and career aspirations. Implications for honors faculty and administrators are discussed.

This article describes the following phenomenon: Gifted high school students trained in solving Olympiad-style mathematics problems experienced conflict between their conceptions of effectiveness and elegance (the EEC). This phenomenon was observed while analyzing clinical task-based interviews that were conducted with three members of the Israeli team participating in the International Mathematics Olympiad. We illustrate how the conflict between the students’ conceptions of effectiveness and elegance is reflected in their geometrical problem solving, and analyze didactical and epistemological roots of the phenomenon.

This article presents results of a study that compared critical thinking in two writing samples (essays) from gifted adolescents who attended a residential school. The essays were written at the beginning of the junior year (when students were admitted to the school) and at the beginning of the senior year. All students in the study composed their first essay in handwritten form. On the second essay, some students were randomly assigned to a computer condition and composed their essays on the computer. Results demonstrated a gender-specific effect of using computers to compose essays. Boys using the computers produced significantly more words, sentences, and paragraphs than boys who did not use the computer to write and received higher ratings on a structured rubric. Girls scored the same in both conditions and performed consistently at a level on par with the boys using computers.