ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that educational strategies targeted to very different student populations have all used the label "accelerated". Accelerated learning appears easy to define. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "accelerate" as "to move or act faster" or "to engage in an academic program that progresses faster than usual". As will be evident from the following discussion, this definition lays out only a small part of what is meant by acceleration. When the focus of acceleration is on serving special student populations, the chapter tends to emphasize speed, moving faster. In other words, acceleration for gifted students is based on moving more quickly through an established curriculum, but it also involves providing students an opportunity to work independently with more abstract, complex, open-ended, multifaceted, and ambiguous material. The chapter illustrates many effective practices already exist that can be used to accelerate all students' learning.
