THE DEVELOPMENT OF GUIDELINES FOR GRADE RETENTION.

The strategy of grade retention (requiring a student to repeat a school grade) began early in the 19th century; concern about its impact on a child's social and emotional development surfaced in the 1930s. Researchers have disagreed as to the efficacy of grade retention and attempts to pinpoint objective standards for making the retention‐or‐promotion decision have not been uniformly successful. Here, the authors describe their in‐progress research, which is aimed at identifying specific criteria for making the decision; they proceed from the premise that students may benefit from specialized educational services more than from merely repeating the same curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]