Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the Second Edition
- 1 Grade Retention
- 2 Research on Grade Repetition
- 3 Retainees in the “Beginning School Study”
- 4 Children's Pathways through the Elementary and Middle School Years
- 5 Characteristics and Competencies of Repeaters
- 6 Achievement Scores before and after Retention
- 7 Adjusted Achievement Comparisons
- 8 Academic Performance as Judged by Teachers
- 9 The Stigma of Retention
- 10 Retention in the Broader Context of Elementary and Middle School Tracking
- 11 Dropout in Relation to Grade Retention
- 12 The Retention Puzzle
- Appendix: Authors Meet Critics, Belatedly
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
6 - Achievement Scores before and after Retention
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the Second Edition
- 1 Grade Retention
- 2 Research on Grade Repetition
- 3 Retainees in the “Beginning School Study”
- 4 Children's Pathways through the Elementary and Middle School Years
- 5 Characteristics and Competencies of Repeaters
- 6 Achievement Scores before and after Retention
- 7 Adjusted Achievement Comparisons
- 8 Academic Performance as Judged by Teachers
- 9 The Stigma of Retention
- 10 Retention in the Broader Context of Elementary and Middle School Tracking
- 11 Dropout in Relation to Grade Retention
- 12 The Retention Puzzle
- Appendix: Authors Meet Critics, Belatedly
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
We now turn to retention's consequences. This chapter and the next two address consequences in the academic realm: achievement test scores in Chapters 6 and 7; report card marks in Chapter 8. The present chapter provides a detailed description of achievement test patterns. Chapter 7 evaluates retainee–never-retained achievement differences analytically, using statistical models to adjust for possible confounds.
Whether repeating helps or harms children academically is perhaps the single most pressing question in weighing the pros and cons of the practice, yet, as we saw in the first two chapters, the jury is still out. Despite many studies, good research on how retention affects children's school performance is sparse. In the next several chapters, repeaters' postretention performance is evaluated against (1) their own performance profile before retention; (2) the performance of other children whose early academic record was about the same as theirs but who were not held back (the strategy of “matched controls”); (3) the performance of all never-retained children after adjusting statistically for characteristics other than retention that might contribute to differences between the groups; and (4) the performance of other children who will be held back after the comparison is made.
This last approach is uncommon. The idea, as an example, is to compare the second grade progress of children held back in first grade against that of children not retained until third grade.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- On the Success of FailureA Reassessment of the Effects of Retention in the Primary School Grades, pp. 82 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002