Teachers may argue that what is best for the child is retention, but others such as S. Contrary to retention, social promotion is when a low achieving student is allowed to pass onto the next grade level despite scores and performance.
The No Child Left Behind Act of ED, basically puts a stop to social promotion by stating that all children will meet state requirements in order to move on to the next grade. Thus, NCLB renders social promotion more of an obsolete term. Consequently, the act encourages educational administrators to retain low-achieving students who do not meet the prerequisites to go onto the next grade.
NCLB sounds great on paper, and it would probably work efficiently if student achievement was based on national content rather than on independent high-stakes test developed by individual states. The act focuses on closing the achievement gap between all students with higher standards and expectations on one standardized test.
As a result, students are required to meet the basic requirements that force retention or social promotion according to NCLB based on one exam. Retention is the primary choice unless a GPC decides otherwise. Thus, a decision between retention and social promotion becomes the issue. Consequently, students with social and emotional problems could possibly end up with lower academic achievement and therefore dropping out of school. Another problem is that the majority of students left behind by NCLB are at-risk students who some teachers perceive as unteachable Collins, What some educators need to understand is that there should be other options other than retention.
Raising performance standards and closing the gap encourages many schools to take a look at the imposed interventions and begin revising them. Overall, the purpose of this study is to examine the literature that investigates the effects of retention on secondary students in grades The review will analyze the following: a the effects of retention on dropout rates, b the effects of retention on socioemotional outcomes, and c the effects of retention on academic achievement.
The evidence presented concerns those students that do not meet the standards set by NCLB and are retained or socially promoted based on GPC decisions. Theoretical Framework. The literature review was conducted to determine the effects of grade retention on dropout rates. Therefore, a study was conducted on behavioral analyses. The frustration self-esteem model identifies problem behaviors and unsuccessful academics as reasons why students drop out of high school Finn, The model indicated that students who are unsuccessful in school develop lower self-esteem which causes unhappiness and discord with the school experience.
Students may also be affected by problem behaviors. Therefore, these students are more likely to drop out of school than the more successful students.
The participation-identification model combined the amount of participation students exert in class and school with how they identify themselves with school and instruction Finn, Participation could be done by participating in classroom discussions or extracurricular activities. Finn found that students with unsuccessful outcomes and low identification with school normally do not participate in extracurricular activities, thus the participation is low.
Moreover, he indicated that these predictors may lead a student to dropping out of school. One such study that identified success and identification with dropping out was performed by the NCES , in which students were asked for their reasons for dropping out of school. The survey resulted in Literature Search. Retention and social promotion are topics that have been widely discussed in the professional literature. Many people seem to have a set opinion on whether or not retention is beneficial.
By searching ERIC, PsychInfo , and Academic Search Complete with keywords grade retention, social promotion, academic achievement, and dropout rates, articles were returned.
To aid the research, Jimerson responded to an email and added helpful information to the review. The Effects of Retention on Dropout Rates. A study by Melissa Roderick criticizes the use of retention by showing that it leads inevitably to dropping out of school.
Department of Education, defines a dropout as a student who does not graduate from high school or complete a program such as the GED to meet the high school requirements. Students who leave the U. Roderick demonstrated the percentage of students who experienced retention once or more in grades kindergarten through eighth with the following information: The study also showed that the dropout rates for students who had never been retained were only This fact means that Students retained two or more times between kindergarten and eighth Roderick and Rumberger believe grade retention is the number one predictor of middle school and high school dropouts.
Thus, Jimerson et al. The research presented has established that retention is a costly intervention for students in that dropping out becomes a prominent possibility. In the middle school setting, the retention rates showed no measurable differences. In summary, while retention rates and dropout rates have decreased in elementary schools, the rates for middle and high schools remain high and according to the NCES is still relatively high and a United States crisis.
Not only are the numbers of dropouts high, but so is the financial cost attached to dropout rates Jimerson et al. Not only does this cost the student a great deal of money, but the state suffers as well. Although some studies suggest that dropping out is directly related to grade retention and dropping out of high school negatively impacts the economy, these studies demonstrate a definite need for further research of the issues that affect retention and dropout rates in order to lower the cost individual students and the state of Texas incur from dropping out e.
With these studies in mind, teachers, school counselors, and administrators need to understand the implications of retention and put student learning first. The Effects of Socioemotional Outcomes. As grade retention is directly related to dropouts, it is highly associated with socioemotional difficulties in school and outside school Jimerson et al. They begin to pick up on their own social and personal identity Huitt.
With that in mind, one has to reflect on the effects of retention from a developmental perspective. From one grade to the next, students are with the same peers unless they are retained which causes peer separation Alexander et al, Separating a student from his or her peers will inevitably cause self-esteem issues.
A child who is retained must feel terrified and unsure about themselves if he or she is told to stay back in a grade that was just completed as his or her friends move on to the next grade. For a child that is just realizing who they are, this could be extremely deleterious. They could engage the participation of students in a way that other accountability policies that only directly affect schools for example, grading schools from A to F do not.
Third-grade students in the —03 school year were the first subjected to the policy. Students scoring below the threshold could receive one of several exemptions and be promoted. Florida used its high-stakes criterion-referenced test, the FCAT, for accountability purposes in a way that is problematic for estimating the treatment effect from the test-based promotion policy. Results on the Stanford-9 exam were used for informational purposes only and played no role in student or school accountability.
For this reason, they were not likely to have been influenced by factors such as teaching-to-the-test or other manipulations. We thus rely on data for student scores on the Stanford-9 to estimate the treatment effect.
Students in the third grade in the —14 school year were the first subjected to the policy. However, a recent study, based on interviews with teachers and administrators and observations of several third-grade classrooms in five Arizona school districts, found that districts and schools made intentional efforts to avoid student retention under the policy in ways that could lead to improvements in student performance before the retention decision.
Districts reported that students as well as parents felt pressure from the policy to improve performance. We evaluate the impact of the test-based promotion policies statewide in Florida and Arizona using longitudinal school-bygrade- level test scores and demographic characteristics.
For each statewide analysis, we use data from the first year that the policy was adopted —03 in Florida and —14 in Arizona and the two prior years. Data from Florida are publicly available and were downloaded from the Florida Department of Education website.
In Arizona, we acquired aggregated data from a data request to the Arizona Department of Education. To estimate effects in Hillsborough County, Florida, we use longitudinal student-level data for the universe of students in grades two through five from school years — through — Student-level data are beneficial not only because of the increased precision but because Hillsborough is one of several districts in the state that administered the Stanford-9 exam district-wide in the second grade.
The estimation samples include all grades or in Hillsborough, all students within grades in schools that have valid test-score data in grades three, four, and five in an observed year. Results are similar if we also include grades six through eight, which are found in several K—8 schools. Our goal is to determine whether, in the first year that the policy was implemented, there was a significant change in the trajectory of third-grade test scores compared with the trajectory in other grades in the school.
The intuition underlying this approach is that the test-based promotion policy would provide an incentive within the third grade and perhaps earlier grades but not in later grades, where students faced no danger of retention under the policy.
Specifically, we employ a difference-in-difference design, where the first difference is across grades and the second difference is over time. The unit of observation for the statewide analysis is a grade within a school.
The dependent variable is the average math or reading score for students within that grade and year. The primary regression analysis includes fixed effects for each school, grade, and year, as well as our variable of interest, which equals 1 if the observation is of the third grade during the first treated year, and equals 0 otherwise i.
The coefficient on the treatment variable represents the differential change in third-grade test scores relative to fourth- and fifth-grade scores in the first year that the policy was in effect. We weight the regression according to the number of students who took the test within the school in a given year, and we cluster the standard errors by school. We first designated six performance thresholds within the scores for the second-grade exam. Florida has been the model for states adopting these policies; in , it mandated that low-scoring third graders be retained and receive remedial services.
But retention has been the subject of longstanding debate. Those in favor believe that low-performing students stand to benefit from the opportunity for more instruction and services. Critics warn that students may be stigmatized or face reduced academic expectations.
They point to evidence that students who are old for their grade level are more likely to drop out of high school. They found that retention in third grade had large positive effects on reading and math achievement in the short run.
They needed less remediation, and they earned higher grades while enrolled. For example, the results showed that third grade retention had no effect on the likelihood that a student would enroll in post-secondary education.
These findings are only one component of a comprehensive analysis of the merits of test-based promotion policies, West adds. Such policies aim to provide incentives for educators and parents to help low-performing students improve their skills before third grade.
More work is needed to understand the extent to which these policies achieve that goal, he says. Advanced Search. User Tools. Sign In. Skip Nav Destination Article Navigation.
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