Grade retention

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Grade retention or grade repetition is the process of having a student who repeats a course, usually one previously failed. Students who repeat a course are referred as "repeaters".[1]

The primary alternative to grade retention (for those who have failed) is a policy of social promotion, under the ideological principle that staying with their same-age peers is important. Social promotion is somewhat more accepted in countries which use tracking to group students according to academic ability. Regardless of retention or promotion, academic scholars believe that underperformance must be addressed with intensive remedial help, such as summer school programs.

In some countries, grade retention has been banned or strongly discouraged. In Canada and the United States, grade retention can be used from Kindergarten through twelfth grade. However, with older students, retention is usually restricted to the specific classes that the student failed, so that a student can be promoted in a math class but retained in a language class.

Where it is permitted, grade retention is most common among students in early elementary school. In the U.S., six-year-old students are most likely to be retained, with another spike around the age of 12.[2] In particular, some large schools have a transitional classroom, sometimes called "Kindergarten 2," for six year olds who are not reading-ready. Most schools refuse to retain a student more than once in a single grade, or more than two or three years across all grades. Students with intellectual disabilities are only retained when parents and school officials agree to do so.

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[edit] History

Different schools have used different approaches throughout history. Grade retention or repetition was essentially meaningless in the one-room schoolhouses of more than a century ago, because access to outside standards were very limited, and the small scale of the school, with perhaps only a few students of each age, was conducive to individualized instruction. With the proliferation of larger, graded schools in the middle of the 19th century, retention became a common practice. In fact, a century ago, approximately half of all American students were retained at least once before the age of 13.[3]

Social promotion began to spread in the 1930s with concerns about the psychosocial effects of retention.[3] The practice of making retention decisions on the basis of the results of a single test — called high-stakes testing — is widely condemned by professional educators.[4] Test authors generally advise that their tests are not adequate for high-stakes decisions, and that decisions should be made based on all the facts and circumstances.[5]

[edit] Research

There is no conclusive evidence that grade retention is either significantly helpful or harmful, and much of the existing research is methodologically invalid.[2] Three different kinds of studies exist or have been proposed, and each has its inherent pitfalls:

  1. Studies which compare students who were retained to students who were considered for retention, but were eventually promoted. These studies favor social promotion.[6] However, the promoted students were not retained because the schools believed them to be stronger or more personally mature students (as evidenced by the decision to promote them). These studies are unfairly biased in favor of social promotion because they compare the better/promoted students to the weaker/retained students.[2]
  2. Studies which compare retained students to their own prior performance. These studies favor grade retention. However, these studies are biased because they do not adequately control for personal growth or changes in environmental factors (such as poverty).[2]
  3. Studies which randomly assign a large pool of borderline students to promotion or retention. This style of research is methodologically sound and, if performed on a sufficiently large scale and with sufficiently detailed information collected, would provide valuable or even definitive information. However, schools and parents are unwilling to have a child's future to affected by a random assignment, and so these studies are simply not done.[2]

Grade retention may be much less significant than whether or not a struggling student receives intensive remedial help.[7] However, based on the existing (if flawed) studies, the following conclusions are widely believed:

Academic outcomes: Retained students are 2 to 11 times more likely to drop out of school when compared to underachieving, but promoted, peers.[8] (Study style #1 favors social promotion.) Students often improve during the year following grade retention, particularly if additional instruction is provided. (Study style #2 favors grade retention.) However, these gains are normally lost in two to three years.

Non-academic outcomes: Retention is associated with poor “social adjustment, attitudes toward school, behavioral outcomes, and attendance.”[9] Retention is a “stronger predictor of delinquency than socioeconomic status, race, or ethnicity,” and is also a strong predictor of drug and alcohol use and teenage pregnancy.[10] (Study style #1 favors social promotion.)

[edit] International

[edit] Asia

Japan and Korea do not allow retention of their students.

[edit] Europe

Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland do not allow retention of their students.

In the United Kingdom, secondary schools commonly use a system of internal academic streaming in which children of the same age are subdivided on the basis of ability, and lower achieving students (those who would be retained under the North American system) are taught in different classes, and at a different rate, from higher achieving students, but are kept within their own age group. This system has largely rendered grade retention unnecessary in all but the most exceptional circumstances.[citation needed]

In most cases where streaming alone is insufficient, additional special needs provision is usually seen being preferable to grade retention, particularly when behavioral difficulties are involved.

[edit] North America

The United States and Canada both use grade retention.

[edit] Common arguments against and for grade retention

The following are common arguments regarding this practice.

[edit] Arguments against grade retention

Opponents of "no social promotion" policies do not defend social promotion so much as say that retention is even worse. They argue that retention is not a cost-effective response to poor performance when compared to cheaper or more effective interventions, such as additional tutoring and summer school. They point to a wide range of research findings that show no advantage to, or even harm from, retention, and the tendency for gains from retention to wash out.

Harm from retention cited by these critics include:

  • May lower the self esteem of the student and make them feel as if they were mentally inferior. It may also cause them to be the subject of ridicule and bullying among their peers moving ahead to the next grade or among the incoming students to the grade they are repeating.
  • Increased drop-out rates of retained students over time
  • No evidence of long-term academic benefit for retained students
  • Increased rates of dangerous behaviors such as drinking, drug-use, crime, and teenage pregnancy among retained students as compared with similarly performing promoted students.

Critics of retention also note that retention has hard dollar costs for school systems: requiring a student to repeat a grade is essentially to add one student for a year to the school system, assuming that the student does in fact stay in the system until graduating from high school.

The possibility of grade retention has been shown to be a significant source of stress for students. In one study of childhood fears performed in the 1980s, the top three fears for US sixth graders were 1) loss of a parent, 2) going blind, 3) being retained. After two decades of increasing retention practices, a repeat of the study in 2001 found that grade retention was the single greatest fear, higher than loss of a parent or going blind.[11] This change likely reflects the students' correct perception that they were statistically far more likely to repeat the sixth grade than to suffer the death of a parent or the loss of their vision.

[edit] Arguments for grade retention

Opponents of social promotion argue that it cheats the child of an education. As a result, when the child gets older, the student will likely fail classes or be forced to attend summer school.

Opponents of social promotion argue that it has the following negative impacts:

  • Students who are promoted cannot do the work
  • Students will have many failures in the high school years which will most likely lead to dropping out
  • It sends the message to all students that they can get by without working hard
  • It forces teachers to deal with under-prepared students while trying to teach the prepared
  • It gives parents a false sense of their children's progress

Some hold that most students at the elementary school level don't take their education seriously and therefore retention is most likely not to be effective. Since most middle school students value their education more, retention should be used if they are judged not to have adequate skills before entering high school.

[edit] References

  1. ^ [1] Definition of repeater, accessed January 28, 2007
  2. ^ a b c d e Grade Retention and Promotion., Steiner, Karen. Retrieved on 2008-01-28.
  3. ^ a b Rose, Janet S.; et al. "A Fresh Look at the Retention-Promotion Controversy." Journal of School Psychology, v21 n3 p201-11 Fall 1983. |url=http://www.eric.ed.gov:80/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ292730&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ292730
  4. ^ Goldberg, M. (2005) “Losing students to high-stakes testing.” In Phi delta kappan 86 p389-395;
    National Association of School Psychologists, & C. Lehr. (2002) “Large scale assessments and high stakes decisions: Facts, cautions, and guidelines.”
  5. ^ Goldberg
  6. ^ Leckrone & Griffith p54
  7. ^ FCAT-based Grade-3 Retention Legislature Analysis Flawed. Retrieved on 2008-01-31.
  8. ^ Anderson, G. E., A. D. Whipple, & S. R. Jimerson (2002) “Grade retention: Achievement and mental health outcomes.” Position paper, National Association of School Psychologists. http://naspcenter.org
  9. ^ Mims, K., R. Stock, & C. Phinizy (2001) “Beyond grade retention.” In eJournal of education policy. At http://jep.csus.edu/journal2001/journals.aspx?id=101 ¶2
  10. ^ Leckrone & Griffith pp54&55
  11. ^ Shane R. Jimerson, Sarah M. Woehr, Amber M. Kaufman (2002). Grade retention: Achievement and mental health outcomes (PDF). National Association of School Psychologists.

[edit] External links