The End to Social Promotion? A Rigorous Look at the Varying Effectiveness of Grade Retention Policies Nationwide

社会推广的终结？

• 批准号: 0532400
• 负责人: Christopher Weiss
• 金额: $ 10万
• 依托单位: Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-09-01 至 2007-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0532400&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: End; Social; Promotion; Rigorous; Look

Grade retention is a policy in which students who have not mastered the skills of a particular grade are required to repeat that grade. It is an educational policy used to combat social promotion though there is little rigorous evidence about the causal effects (positive or negative) of retention on student outcomes. Moreover, little is known about the effects of compensatory policies that many districts now operate in tandem with grade retention policies. This project will adapt and refine an innovative statistical approach (Classification Trees) for use in causal estimation for observational studies, using it to investigate the effects of grade retention on students' cognitive and behavioral outcomes. The project also will use an instrumental variables strategy to estimate effects of retention. Importantly, effects will be allowed to vary depending on the mix of compensatory programs available to children to better understand the implications of the findings within specific school contexts.Grade retention is an area that is ripe for further investigation given the lack of rigorous causal analyses, the improbability of a randomized experiment to assess its effect, the need to examine the effects of retention in conjunction with other compensatory policies, and the policy importance of the topic. In addition, refinement of classification tree methods for use in causal inference will be useful for many researchers trying to answer causal questions in the absence of randomized experiments. This award was supported as part of the Fiscal Year 2005 Mathematical Sciences priority area special competition on Mathematical Social and Behavioral Sciences (MSBS).

留级是一种政策，要求没有掌握某一年级技能的学生留级。这是一项用来对抗社会晋升的教育政策，尽管很少有严格的证据表明留校对学生成绩的因果影响（积极或消极）。此外，人们对许多地区现在与保留年级政策同时实施的补偿政策的影响知之甚少。本项目将调整和完善一种创新的统计方法（分类树），用于观察性研究的因果估计，用它来调查成绩保留对学生认知和行为结果的影响。该项目还将使用工具变量策略来估计保留率的影响。重要的是，为了更好地理解研究结果在特定学校环境中的含义，将允许根据儿童可获得的补偿计划的组合而产生不同的效果。由于缺乏严格的因果分析，不可能进行随机实验来评估其影响，需要结合其他补偿政策来检查保留的影响，以及该主题在政策上的重要性，因此，留级是一个成熟的领域，可以进一步进行调查。此外，用于因果推理的分类树方法的改进对于许多试图在缺乏随机实验的情况下回答因果问题的研究人员是有用的。该奖项是2005财政年度数学科学优先领域数学社会和行为科学特别竞赛的一部分。