Should Struggling Students Repeat a Grade?

Having a student who is struggling in school can be frustrating, but the prospect of “holding back” your child, or having them repeat a grade, is just as defeating. While you want your child to succeed, it’s hard to see them take a step backward and not progressing through their academics with their friends. So what’s best for your child?

Thousands of third-graders may have a sense of déjà vu on the first day of school this year: The number of states that require third-graders to be held back if they can’t read increased to 13 in the last year.

Founded in 1943, ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) is an educational leadership organization dedicated to advancing best practices and policies for the success of each learner. Our 175,000 members in 119 countries are professional educators from all levels and subject areas––superintendents, supervisors, principals, teachers, professors of education, and school board members.

Ohio is one of 14 states to put in place a retention rule that holds back students who are not reading at grade level. Special correspondent John Tulenko rep...

My English 2001 Multimodal project based on my researched argument essay asserting that giving students individual attention instead of having them repeat a ...

Grade retention or social promotion -- which is best? Read what the experts have to say.

New research on the debate between retention and social promotion

With substantial evidence indicating future educational struggles for those children who don't acquire basic reading skills by third grade, Martin West discusses the effectiveness of policies that retain students and provide them with intensive remedial interventions versus those that promote students to keep them with their peers.

It will help students learn the curriculum better. :) if they repeat the grade, they may become successful in the next year and if not, just move onto the next year to see if they achieve something else to get better grades than they did the year before. So yes, I think they should.

Do you know anyone who has repeated a grade? Find out why this happens in this article for kids.

At first glance, grade retention may look like old-fashioned common sense: Fail the year? Just do it over! In fact, with new emphasis on hard-nosed standards, the tactic is on the rise around the country. Old-fashioned, yes, says the National Association of School Psychologists. But common sense? Not on your life. Retention, cautions the association, is in fact “an ineffective and possibly harmful intervention.”

If your child was falling behind at school, would you consider them repeating a year? New research says it may not be the best option.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 16, 2011—Struggling students who repeat first or second grade can make significant short-term gains in their academic skills, according to a study of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District released today by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). Most first-graders made sizeable improvements in reading skills when they repeated that grade, and second-graders made meaningful gains in English language arts and math in the year they were retained.

The study of early elementary school retention in the Los Angeles district—which serves 11 percent of public school students in California—looks at which students are retained and how they fare academically during the year they repeat a grade.

Because of the district's size and diversity, the findings have implications for others, particularly those serving urban areas. They shed light on a practice that is contentious for both schools and parents and whose effectiveness in the early grades is not well understood. California school districts develop their own promotion and retention policies, but the state does not collect information on how frequently students are retained or whether retention leads to academic improvement.

In the Los Angeles district, 7.5 percent of students who entered kindergarten in 2006 were retained before the third grade. Retention rates vary even among schools with similar student populations, reflecting the wide variation in principals' attitudes about the practice. Interviewed as part of the PPIC report, many principals acknowledge that repeating a grade can have short-term benefits. But some remain concerned that holding students back may have adverse long-term consequences.

Children in the district with the lowest scores on kindergarten assessments of early reading skills—the earliest academic measures available—are most likely to be retained in these early grades. Other student groups at higher risk for retention are those entering school at relatively young ages, boys, children from low-income families, English learners, Latinos, and African Americans. A combination of these risk factors—particularly age and gender—can greatly increase the chance of retention. For example, boys who are relatively younger have the highest likelihood of repeating a grade and girls who are relatively older have the lowest.

Students who repeat an early grade—even across groups with different risk factors—can make significant short-term improvement, although they are not likely to achieve the same scores as their peers who do not repeat a grade. The scores of first-graders who were retained rose from an average of 40 percent correct on a reading skills assessment to 64 percent correct a year later. The gains made by children who repeated second grade were also sizeable. The majority measurably improved their skills in English language arts and math, as assessed by the California Standards Tests. A significant number of students attained proficient status, with bigger gains in math than in English language arts. Before repeating second grade, just 1 percent were proficient in English language arts and 6 percent were proficient in math. A year later, 41 percent were proficient in math and 18 percent in English language arts.

"Retention is a very serious step—difficult for a young student and costly for state taxpayers—and early intervention to avert it is in the best interests of everyone. But when other options fail, many young students can benefit, at least in the short term, from repeating a grade," says Jill Cannon, PPIC research fellow, who co-authored the report with Stephen Lipscomb, a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research and an adjunct fellow at PPIC. "These findings give educators and parents an estimate of the types of academic improvements that can be reasonably expected."

The report, Early Grade Retention and Student Success: Evidence from Los Angeles, is supported with funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

This report will appear on PPIC's website after 9 p.m. PDT on March 16. The URL will be http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=910.

Kim McDowell, an early childhood educator at Wichita State University, says there are a number of arguments for repeating a grade, while others say repeating a grade is ineffective.

Any way he looks at it, repeating first grade hurt Sergio Yamayo."Students would say things like 'Hey, flunker, what's up?' That would really get me mad," says the Canoga Park teen-ager, now

Student retention is a process in which a teacher feels like it would benefit a student for one reason or another to keep them in the same grade for two consecutive years.

Repeating a grade gives weaker pupils a chance, say advocates. Detractors counter that having pupils repeat grades wastes time and hurts children's feelings....

At first glance, grade retention may look like old-fashioned common sense: Fail the year? Just do it over!

Discusses issues and research surrounding grade retention in the school system. Suggests remedial interventions as a possible solution.

Teachers and parents are sometimes faced with the question of whether to have a child repeat a grade because he seems unprepared to learn the mate­rial in the next grade. When making this decision, keep in mind that research shows that low-achieving students tend to progress at the same rate, whether they are retained or promoted. Retained students do not necessarily score better on achievement tests at the end of the repeated grade, compared with similar students who are promoted. Even if retained students improve on stan­dardized test scores, their overall learning does not appear to increase.

Making Retention A Last Resort: Too often, educators find themselves choosing between social promotion and retention, when neither benefits children. Some districts have found that intensive intervention in the early grades can eliminate the choice between two unappealing options.

I say no because most kids fail classes because they don't understand the lessons. If they don't understand the lesson one year, they wont understand it the next year either because its the same thing every year. Why make them repeat the class if they just don't understand the lessons at all. It's not like learning the same thing twice is going to help them understand it. It will make them understand it even less than they already do. They shouldn't have to repeat the class, they should just get extra help. If a teacher notices there failing, they should get them extra help. They should contact their parents and let them know the situation so the parent and teacher can negotiate a plan on how the student can improve his or her grade. There's a difference between a student caring about his/or her education but just not understanding the lessons, and a student just not caring

Has your child's school suggested repeating a grade? Learn the pros and cons of staying behind for kids with learning and attention issues.

Every March, I get a slew of new referrals for testing students for learning disabilities, ADHD, and other disabilities, as the sheer panic of “What is going to happen to this student in X+1 grade???” (Where X is the child’s current grade, plus one. See? Algebra is useful after all.) I hear parents and teachers wonder out loud how the kid who is not meeting grade standards is going to make it next year. I hear murmurs in the teacher’s lounge about retention. And I cringe. I don’t mind the referrals for testing.* As a parent or teacher, I would want ...

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