Please help me understand social promotion.

[willk]

According to many articles I've read online, forcing a student to repeat a year doesn't help them learn the material. Could anyone help me understand why that's the case? The only thing I see are articles saying that studies prove repeating a year doesn't help. Nowhere can I find an explanation as to why such an intuitive concept is incorrect.

 

[Guardian Box]

If I had to guess it's because if they can't learn the material the first time, they have issues that won't be solved by repeating a year again.

 

[mizzet]

It is pretty difficult to draw proper conclusions on why something like this is happening beyond naming hypotheses.

Similarly to repeating years, school does a lot of things that research tells us is actually counterproductive to actual learning. The grading system encourages disliking learning, failure avoidance behaviour (Doing something to avoid failure, rather then to succeed or doing it because you believe it worthwhile. Which also encourages people to crash and burn once they do fail), significant loss of motivation/self-esteem when failing, generally worse performance and learning for short-term retention of information over remembering them long term.

In the context of other failures of the school system repeating a year isn't really set up to help learning. It is likely a significant hit to self-esteem, it puts them into a situation where learning the material is likely to feel both unnecessary and more boring (As it's just repeating what they were already put through) while actual retention material for this length is not actually encouraged in the school system, it also forces students to integrate themselves in a new social group. And, of course, does nothing to actually fix any of the problems that might have led the student to not do well the previous year.

I'd also ask how this kind of thing influences teacher biases. Teacher expectations have been shown to have a pretty big influence on student performance. Being a student who has already 'failed' a year is unlikely to do them any favours in that regard.

 

[willk]

Thank you Mizzet! I thought people were saying if a teacher fails once, they can never help the student. What you're saying makes sense! Do you know why high schools hand diplomas to those who are Elementary to Middle School level students at best?

 

[mizzet]

Thank you Mizzet! I thought people were saying if a teacher fails once, they can never help the student. What you're saying makes sense! Do you know why high schools hand diplomas to those who are Elementary to Middle School level students at best?

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I'm afraid I'm not too familiar with that. Not even sure about the concrete circumstances of it. Grew up in a different school system (People went to different school depending on performance and finished differently) and haven't read any literature on it.

 

[John_Oakman]

Do you know why high schools hand diplomas to those who are Elementary to Middle School level students at best?

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In the context of american education systems schools are rewarded (budget wise, and punished for high number of failures) for having high percentage of students graduating, and since what happens to said students afterward is not their problem there's a perverse incentive for them to just pump out the numbers.

 

[beast_regards]

I don't know how it works in the US, but here, idea is that either student gets in on repeated lessons, and they need to be given chance ... and if they don't get it, we have proof that it is indeed a case, so they can be thrown into so-called "special schools"