An Extra Year Couldn’t Hurt: Kindergarten Retention and Cognitive Development Revisited

• In Event: 3429 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 7. Early Childhood

Abstract

Previous work on grade retention in kindergarten, especially the work by Hong and colleagues (Hong and Raudenbush 2005; Hong and Yu 2007) identifies a lasting negative impact on cognitive development for retained students. However, this research compares retained students to their same-age former peers despite their different grades. This strategy has a trade off – while it allows for a clear counterfactual framework, it does not directly measure the possible benefit of an extra year of schooling. This study revisits the ECLS-K data using an innovative growth model approach to compare student growth trajectories when retained and promoted students were in the same grade. I find that retention in kindergarten has a positive effect in the short term but a null effect over time. Given the imperfections inherent to both analytic strategies, I propose viewing the results presented as a complement Hong and colleagues’ findings; they represent the upper and lower bound of the effect of kindergarten retention. While a null long term effect of kindergarten retention does not justify its cost, the current study can perhaps allay concerns among parents who choose kindergarten repetition for their children for non-academic reasons.

Author

• Brian R. Fitzpatrick, University of Notre Dame