Sadly, these are aggregates of unpublished results, from multiple sources I've talked to over the years.
Last year of "gymnasium" (grade 12), right before I started my university masters program: I was travelling most of the year and only returned to school two months before graduation. I spent less than two months, on my own, reading up on a year's worth of what amounts to a specialised "science focused high school" program. Then testing through, taking all tests and assignments for a year, and got the top result from both schools in the city. 1000+ students graduating that year.
This was pretty insane, so I started digging. How was it possible to score so well after so little time, studying alone, when everyone else had 10 months of class. I'm not 200 IQ with eidetic memory.
So I started talking with teachers and professors I came in contact with. Very few actually had data available, but those who had... Wow!
Regardless of whether it's young children, high school, or university students the numbers were similar.
The top few are simply so much faster than the rest. I'm absolutely sure that good pedagogical methods have a huge effect on the students' learning. But even the best methods and tutors can't make up the difference.
The "5%", specifically, comes from two sources. A physics teacher and a math professor. They were both very interested in pedagogical methods and were experimenting and keeping detailed data on every student they had taught, over decades. Scoring them on a wide variety of tests and situations. Both had similar numbers, falling around 5-10x between the top 5% and the median.
My impression is that this is simply an issue that most societies don't want to know or deal with. It certainly is not hard to test for. Specifically, the physics teacher mentioned above told me that the municipal head of schools had threatened to fire him when he tried to discuss the data to improve the teaching for high capacity students.
I'd like the link as well. Good luck finding anything related to this on Google or Google Scholar. At this point, I'd have more luck starting from the IQ page on Wikipedia.
Last year of "gymnasium" (grade 12), right before I started my university masters program: I was travelling most of the year and only returned to school two months before graduation. I spent less than two months, on my own, reading up on a year's worth of what amounts to a specialised "science focused high school" program. Then testing through, taking all tests and assignments for a year, and got the top result from both schools in the city. 1000+ students graduating that year.
This was pretty insane, so I started digging. How was it possible to score so well after so little time, studying alone, when everyone else had 10 months of class. I'm not 200 IQ with eidetic memory.
So I started talking with teachers and professors I came in contact with. Very few actually had data available, but those who had... Wow!
Regardless of whether it's young children, high school, or university students the numbers were similar.
The top few are simply so much faster than the rest. I'm absolutely sure that good pedagogical methods have a huge effect on the students' learning. But even the best methods and tutors can't make up the difference.
The "5%", specifically, comes from two sources. A physics teacher and a math professor. They were both very interested in pedagogical methods and were experimenting and keeping detailed data on every student they had taught, over decades. Scoring them on a wide variety of tests and situations. Both had similar numbers, falling around 5-10x between the top 5% and the median.
My impression is that this is simply an issue that most societies don't want to know or deal with. It certainly is not hard to test for. Specifically, the physics teacher mentioned above told me that the municipal head of schools had threatened to fire him when he tried to discuss the data to improve the teaching for high capacity students.