Multi-age instructional settings in less developed countries

What can age by grade tell us about education in Australia?

“…The field encompasses the reasons for differences in age by grade distributions together with their causes and effects, topics which have been explored in a variety of unconnected studies. Demographic distributions have been studied as thecontrol of pupil flows in the AUSTRALIAN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER VOLUME 28 No 1 APRIL 2001 81 interests of efficiency (Frederiksen, 1983); the spread of ages across grades in developing countries (Noonan and Hallak, 1987); the outcomes of policies of grade repetition in the United States (see for example, Cates and Ash, 1983); the economics of delay in pupil progress in the early years of the 20 th century (Ayres, 1909); the relationship between the high school dropout rates of those who have repeated and the relationship between dropout, ethnicity and family income (Grissom and Shepard, 1989; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1998; Anderson, 1999); outcomes for children of delay in the early years of schooling (Shepard and Smith, 1989;Kenny, 1991 ;West, et al, 2000); evidence from historical records of age by grade distributions (McKenzie, et al, 1996), the processes used within schools for selective promotion of pupils in Victoria (ACER, 1957); the gender differential in delay in progress in New South Wales, Victoria and New Zealand (Thompson, 1983); the ethnic differential in school progress (McDonald, 1988a); reflections on the ethics of social promotion (Morss, 1998); and the misinterpretation of the role of chronological age in the construction and scoring of age-normed tests (Cahan and Cohen, 1989;de Lemos, 1989). All the examples referred to above are connected in some manner to the demographic patterns of schooling but none of the authors has made reference to work outside his or her own area of interest.…”