Long-term effects of retention in grade 8 in Luxembourg

Meta-analyses 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. However, in the short term, positive effects of grade retention are quite likely to occur. In Luxembourg, more than half of the students repeat at least one grade within their entire school career. Since grade retention is applied quite frequently, the aim of the current study was to examine long-term effects of grade retention. A representative sample of 2,835
Luxembourgish 8th grade students was used for this study, and propensity score matching was applied to select a control group of promoted students who were similar to the retained students on a variety of characteristics. Furthermore, a type of comparison was used by which the outcome variables of the retained and promoted students were compared at different times while the grade- and age-cohort were held equal between groups. With respect to school marks as an indicator of students’ academic achievement, this study showed that grade 8 retention lowered repeaters’ school marks, on average, in grades 10 to 13, as compared to matched non-repeaters.