Abstract
Schools across the globe routinely organize students by grade levels, where individuals of a similar age are taught together. Children typically enter school with members of their cohort, as determined by a date-of-birth cutoff, and advance one grade level per year. Undoubtedly, this practice arises from the notion that some form of tracking, ie grouping together students with relatively similar levels of knowledge and maturity, is the most efficient way to provide instruction. However, the primary use of age to determine grade levels inevitably leads to the following problem: what should public school systems do when a student’s level of knowledge or preparation is well below that of his/her age group? 1 One policy used to address this problem is retention, whereby a student repeats the same grade level with the following (younger) cohort of students, and is expected to remain with this younger cohort for the remaining years of public instruction. The use of grade retention is common in the US, where Eide and Showalter (2001) estimate that 2 percent of all students in public schools are retained every year. Retention is typically part of a broader set of interventions, such as summer school or course remediation, which are designed to help students improve when they lag behind their grade level. Retention decisions can be based on various measures of academic performance, and the use of high-stakes tests to determine grade retention has grown in the US since the adoption of test-based accountability programs in the last two decades. Grade retention is highly controversial, with critics arguing that it imposes negative academic and psychological …