The Effect of Grade Retention on Child Test Scores

Abstract

Each year an estimated two million children in the United States repeat a grade. Investing an additional year in the same grade is expected to help a child to acquire the academic skills she lacks. This, in turn, would help her to be successful in higher grades. In spite of its popularity, grade retention remains a highly controversial practice. A majority of researchers find that, for the repeaters, repeating a grade is strongly correlated with the poor performance in mathematics and reading tests. In this paper I examine whether repeating a grade adds value to the academic performance of repeaters as measured by their improvement in mathematics and reading test scores. I focus on retention in grades one to five. I use data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Child Survey. Using a difference-in-difference propensity score matching estimator I find that repeating a grade does not lead to an improvement in a repeaters' performance in these tests. On contrary, repeating a grade adversely affects their performance in these tests.

Effectiveness of grade retention: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…2), which were again screened by the first two authors independently. Finally, 84 studies (Afsa, 2011;Alet, Bonnal, & Favard, 2013;Allensworth, 2005;André, 2009;Andrew, 2014;Appelmans, 2016;Battistin & Schizzerotto, 2012Belot & Vandenberghe, 2014;Bhattacharya, 2008;Bietenbeck, 2014 Jacob & Lefgren, 2004, 2009Keslair, 2007;Klapproth et al, 2016;Koppensteiner, 2014 Hughes, 2012;Nunes, Balcão Reis, & Seabra, 2018;Okurut, 2018;Ou & Reynolds, 2010;Ozek, 2015;Park, Steiner, & Kaplan, 2018;Pereira & Reis, 2014;Peterson & Hughes, 2011;Roderick & Nagaoka, 2005;Schumann, 2012;Schwerdt et al, 2017;Troncin, 2005;Uysal, 2010;Vandecandelaere, Schmitt, Vanlaar, De Fraine, & Van Damme, 2016c;Vandecandelaere, Vanlaar, Goos, De Fraine, & Van Damme, 2011, 2013Vandecandelaere, Vansteelandt, De Fraine, & Van Damme, 2016a, 2016bWinters & Greene, 2012;Wu, West, & Hughes, 2008 covering 1328 single effects were included in our review (see Fig. 2).…”

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Effects of Grade Retention Policies: A Literature Review of Empirical Studies Applying Causal Inference

“…Primary school. Bhattacharya, S. (2007) in The results indicate that potential grade retention, even at fourth grade, increases the propensity that a student drops out of school at a later point in time.…”

“…Using a DiD approach, Bhattacharya (2007) found that repetition did not add any value. Children who repeated a grade were more likely to experience a decrease in test scores than they would have if they had not been retained.…”