School psychologists have been in the forefront among educators and school professionals to raise concerns both about the potential dangers and the questionable benefits of holding students back. Since opposing retention appears to some to be "counter-intuitive," being able to promote alternatives to retention with research support becomes all the more critical.
To accompany the position statement and to offer school psychologists the means to use research to assist in making retention decisions, the following primer is offered.
In addition to the greater likelihood of retention if the child is African-American, Hispanic and/or male, children whose parents are high school dropouts and who are living in poverty are also at greater risk for retention. Surveys which have looked at kindergarten retention specifically have found that those children most likely to be retained were boys who were black or Hispanic, were born in the second half of the year, were developmentally delayed or had a physical or learning disability, or who had parents with no college education. Children from families living below the poverty line were also more likely to be retained in kindergarten.
The effect of retention on academic achievement as been the subject of many research studies over the years. The quality of these studies is highly variable, and some critics have concluded that the research is so poor that no valid conclusion can be drawn regarding the benefit or harm of retention.
Nonetheless, those who have completed more thorough reviews of the research, including meta-analyses of the data, have fairly uniformly concluded that the evidence on the whole does not support the use of student retention. Furthermore, when care is taken to extract the most valid and best-designed studies, the evidence even more clearly supports promoting underachieving students over retaining them.
Of the 54 studies which met minimal research standards, 47 found negative effects: children who were retained did worse on subsequent measures of academic achievement than children who were promoted. The disadvantage was particularly pronounced in the area of reading achievement. In general, children who are retained perform the best in the year they are retained and may outperform the promoted children when making same grade comparisons (e.g., comparing the achievement of children retained in first grade after the repeated year to the first grade achievement scores of the promoted children).
Studies that look at academic achievement over time have consistently found that even when retained children have the advantage after the repeated year, within two or three years, their achievement has declined to the point where they are doing no better, and are often achieving lower scores than comparable children who were promoted.
Individual studies have generally been consistent with this finding. The retained students performed better in the year they repeated but once they entered first grade, their reading and math achievement was no better than the promoted group. This study was noteworthy for the fact that while the students were below average when compared to district norms, they were above average when compared to national norms.
In another study, we looked at grade four achievement in a group of 1,376 low-income, mostly black children. They were compared to a sample of 198 promoted children matched on numerous variables such as reading and math achievement and teacher ratings prior to retention. Children who were retained did significantly poorer than the matched promoted children on both math and reading achievement measures. In reading, for instance, the retained group gained on average about 5 months in the year following retention whereas the promoted group gained 7 months on the Test of Basic Skills.
Recently, a large-scale study has been interpreted to support the use of retention. This is a large and complex study and has been critiqued by well-known researchers in the field. The authors' interpretation of their data is that while children who were retained in first grade did not benefit from retention (primarily because of the complexity and severity of their problems), children retained at higher grade levels did benefit. This benefit occurred primarily because the authors felt retention halted a "free fall" that was observed as their academic achievement declined across grade levels. Retention appeared to halt that decline, although critics have argued that the results may have been artifacts of their research design rather than the most valid measures of achievement.
The general consensus is that individual children may benefit from retention; however, it is virtually impossible to predict which children benefit and which do not. We analyzed the 10 studies in the meta-analysis which found positive effects of retention and found they had several factors in common: the studies were conducted with a middle-class population in suburban, predominantly white communities, and the children retained were of average intelligence and close to average on standardized achievement tests (i.e., less than .74 standard deviations below the mean). In these same positive studies, detailed education plans were developed to address specific areas of weakness and students were not simply "recycled" through the same curriculum they had been exposed to during the year prior to retention. Many were placed in classes with low student-teacher ratios and some were mainstreamed for part of the school day into classes with their age peers. These studies did not provide similar kinds of individualized assistance for the matched promoted group, thus raising questions about whether it was the retention that produced the benefit or the individualized program.
We have found that children who were retained scored lower on measures of self-concept and attitude toward school than children who were promoted, although the differences were relatively slight. Studies since that time have generally found that self-concept measures have not favored promoted children. Retained children perceived themselves to be significantly more competent than promoted children. No initial measure of competence was taken prior to the retention and the unmeasured differences between the two groups initially may account for the significant difference following retention.
Most studies of retention use fairly global measures of self-concept or school competence. The fact that students who were retained scored higher on these scales in both these studies than students who were promoted suggests that retention did not damage how they saw themselves as learners.
We matched a sample of students placed in a transition class to an equivalent group of children who had been in first grade the year before the transition class was established (called "transition room eligible" students). In each group, half the children were taught reading via a regular classroom basal reading series program while the other half had a carefully designed individualized reading program. This study found that transition-room eligible children placed in a regular first grade classroom and given an individualized reading program outperformed both transition room-eligible children placed in a regular first grade classroom with a traditional reading curriculum and the transition room students taught with the individualized reading program. While this study speaks to the importance of curriculum and instruction in meeting the needs of at-risk students, it also suggests that less tangible factors (such as teacher expectations and classroom climate) may also be playing a role when children are placed in transition classes.
Studies that have looked at children being held out a year prior to attending kindergarten also show no clear benefits for the practice. We compared delayed entrants with children who started school "on time" in a suburban school district on a variety of dimensions including academic achievement, social/emotional status and athletic competence. Delayed entrants were children with birthdays between May 1 and September 1 whose parents voluntarily held them out a year. Controlling for ability, we found that although the achievement of delayed entrants was comparable to control students in elementary school, by senior high school, delayed entrants were significantly lower on group standardized achievement measures. From the elementary to secondary school, achievement levels for delayed entrants dropped 12 percentile points. No differences were found in perceived competence; delayed entrants were only slightly more involved in sports at the secondary level. Delayed entrance has also been associated with increased rates of behavior problems.
No researcher has found long-term, substantial benefits to the practice of retention. No study has shown that students who are retained do better in high school or after high school than students who are not retained on any measure, even when controlling for important factors such as school achievement, ability, demographic variables, etc.
We have found that students who are retained in grade are significantly more likely to drop out of school than students who are promoted, and this holds up even controlling for achievement levels. While 17% of normal age students achieving at the 5th stanine or higher dropped out of school, 41% of overage students achieving at that same level dropped out. Thus, being retained in grade is a better predictor of school dropout than achievement.
But school dropout is not the only long-term effect of retention. Several recent studies reported in the medical literature have found other negative effects. One study looked at drug use in an "old-for-grade" high school population in urban/suburban Chicago. 37% of the student population surveyed were old for grade. One shortcoming of the study is that the authors were unable to determine the causes for being old for grade; thus, it is not possible to determine if children who were held out a year or retained early in their school career were more or less likely to engage in these risky behaviors than those who were retained later in school.
A new study found that being old for grade was associated with higher levels of emotional distress, substance use and involvement with violence. They also found that students who perceive themselves as looking older than their peers were more likely to have used cigarettes, alcohol and marijuana, and were more likely to have used violence and to have expressed suicidal thoughts. The same studies that look at retention effects, when they employ matched samples, also investigate the effects of social promotion.
Politicians employ rhetoric rather than research when they make a case for ending social promotion. Some districts have taken steps to tighten promotion policies. In other cases, parents, teachers and school principals appear, on a more informal basis, to be raising retention as a viable intervention to address the problems of underachievement and "immaturity." We are calling for alternatives to both retention and social promotion that more successfully address the needs of at-risk students than either of these practices. While the research evidence suggests that in the absence of other alternatives children are likely to be better off being promoted than being retained, we have taken a stand that schools must find more effective interventions than either of these practices.
Jeff C. Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.
Source: https://ebookschoice.com/the-effect-of-retention-on-academic-achievement/
