Long-Term Effects of Retention in Grade 8 in Luxembourg

Meta-analyses (Hattie, 2009; Jimerson, 2001) have suggested that grade retention rarely has positive effects and more often negative effects on students’ performance and psycho-emotional well-being. The occurrence of negative effects may be due to the absence of new learning experiences (Pagani, Tremblay, Vitaro, Boulerice & McDuff, 2001). However, in the short term, positive effects of grade retention are quite likely to occur (Klapproth, Schaltz, Brunner, Keller, Fischbach, Ugen & Martin, 2016). In Luxembourg, more than half of the students repeat at least one grade within their entire school career (Klapproth & Schaltz, 2015). Since grade retention is applied so frequently, the aim of the current study was to examine long-term effects of grade retention, and particularly retention in grade 8. The data used in this study were drawn from 2,835 Luxembourgish students who completed primary education (grade 6) and began secondary education (grade 7) in the 2008-2009 school year. We conducted propensity-score matching to select retained and promoted students with comparable characteristics. We used the “same age-cohort, same grade, different times of measurement” approach for comparisons (Klapproth et al., 2016). The dependent variables were the school marks in the main subjects (German, French, and mathematics) in grades 10, 11, and 12, which can vary between 0 and 60 (with higher values indicating better achievement, and values below 30 indicating insufficient achievement). Our results showed that grade 8 repeaters obtain significantly lower school marks in grades 10 to 12 as compared to matched non-repeaters, with most negative effects appearing for mathematics and French (as opposed to German) and with negative effects strengthening significantly with time. These results seem to confirm results of previous meta-analyses on longer-term effects of grade retention, seemingly suggesting that grade retention is no effective means to tackle low student achievement.