grade placements) in one or more content areas. Effective subject-matter acceleration requires the cooperation of teachers in subsequent grades, so that the student is not forced to repeat the material. Important points about subject acceleration include credit and placement. The student should receive credit for work completed, and the student should be placed in the next level of a course after successfully completing a course. More information about subject acceleration is provided on the Acceleration Institute website. Mentoring In mentoring, a student is paired with a mentor or expert tutor who provides advanced or more rapid pacing of instruction. Mentoring of gifted high school students by successful adults often has beneficial long-term effects, including improved focus on career goals. The career effects are especially pronounced for women students. Making Decisions about Acceleration A number of tools have been developed to help educators and families make decisions about academic acceleration. The Acceleration Institute website provides many resources about acceleration, including research articles, free resources, and other information useful to parents, educators, policymakers, and researchers. The Iowa Acceleration Scale is a paper-and-pencil tool designed to help educators gather relevant information and conduct a team meeting with educators, administrators, and parents and determine if acceleration (specifically, a grade-skip) is a good match for a particular student. The Integrated Acceleration System, launched in 2021, is an online platform that assists educators and families in working their way through the process of decision-making about acceleration. It guides participants through the integration of information about acceleration. Informed by decades of research, it includes all of the major factors to consider when making a decision and produces a report about readiness for one of the many forms of acceleration, including grade-skipping, early entrance to kindergarten, subject acceleration, and early entrance to college. Above-level testing, in which a student takes a test designed for older students, is frequently used to determine a student's readiness for subject acceleration. Educational policy helps to ensure that acceleration is offered to all students who might benefit from it, not just those who have parents advocating for them. Information about developing academic acceleration policies can be found in the publication, Developing Academic Acceleration Policies: Whole Grade, Early Entrance, and Single Subject. Inequalities and Critiques Academic acceleration and gifted programs more broadly face critique for significant and consistent under-representation of minority students - particularly students of African American and Latino descent. In 2009, African