Does It Pay to Be One of the Oldest in Class?

• In Event: 45.025 - Looking at Motivation Across Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract

We examined relative age effects on students’ peer relations, academic self-concept, grades, and which types of secondary school teachers recommend students attend after elementary school. We used a representative sample of N = 18,956 German elementary school students in 1,160 classrooms and applied multilevel regression to control for covariates at the individual and classroom level. There were no substantial relative age effects across any of the outcomes, except for a small negative effect of being among the oldest in class on students’ self-concept in reading when compared to the youngest. Moreover, the oldest students were less likely to receive an academic-track recommendation. Our findings contradict the common assumption that younger students in class are disadvantaged compared to their older classmates.

Authors

• Julia Kretschmann, Universität Potsdam

• Andrea Westphal, University of Potsdam, Germany

• Miriam Vock, University of Potsdam