Tier 3: Intensive Targeted Intervention

Tier 3 refers to evidence-based intensive targeted interventions for students whose academic and intellectual needs are not being met by Tier 1 or Tier 2 supplemental and/or targeted instruction.

Generally, children and adolescents who need this intervention are highly or exceptionally gifted (IQ of 145 or greater). Early speech, reading, and other developmental skills are indicators of a highly gifted child. This small percentage of students require radical acceleration, dual enrollment, early entrance, specialized counseling, long-term mentorships, or participation in a specialized classroom or school for gifted students. They require a curriculum that differs significantly in pace, level, complexity, and abstraction from age-level peers. Tier 3 instruction may take place in addition to Tier 1 instruction or it may replace it entirely. If progress monitoring and diagnostic assessments indicate that a student is not making adequate progress, a student may need a replacement of the core program (Tier 1 instruction) or be referred for further evaluation.

The highly gifted child needs an Advanced Learning Plan that will make provisions for alternative learning opportunities that may include grade skipping/telescoping or curriculum compacting. In addition, early identification of these individuals will help to ensure that programming may be planned for them to allow for continued growth at each student’s level of potential. For some students, regular differentiation and instructional management/delivery are not enough. The higher the IQ or ability of the student, the more acceleration and modifications must be put in place to maintain the balance between the student and his or her curriculum.

Exceptionally gifted children appear in the population at a ratio of fewer than one in 10,000. Research has repeatedly found that these children differ quite significantly from moderately gifted age-peers on many cognitive and affective variables.

Because of this, it is not enough to place them in part-time programs, such as a resource room or pull-out, which are designed for moderately gifted students; they require full-time grouping with children closer to their own mental age and levels of socio-affective development. Research suggests that exceptionally and profoundly gifted students are best served by a program of radical incorporating grade-skips appropriately spaced through the student's school career, supplemented with subject acceleration where it is required. Radical acceleration provides the extremely gifted child with the intellectual and social companionship of children at similar stages of cognitive and affective development. Exceptionally gifted children retained with age-peers, or accelerated by only one year, are at serious risk of peer rejection and social isolation.

It is now generally understood and accepted that a child's level of social and emotional development is more highly correlated with his mental age than with his chronological age (Callahan & Kauffman, 1982; Tannenbaum, 1983; Janos & Robinson, 1985). The significance of this is immense when dealing with the extremely gifted since the higher the IQ, the greater the discrepancy between chronological and mental age, and thus the wider the gap between the psychosocial development of the gifted child and that of his age-peers.

Please see Tier 3 List of Acceleration Interventions printer-friendly version.

“The use of radical acceleration in cases of extreme intellectual precocity” Miraca U.M. Gross, National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC), Gifted Child Quarterly 1992.