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Repeat Kindergarten: Giving Your Child More Time to Grow
How could a child flunk out of kindergarten?
The real question of course is: should you do it? Should you hold your child back from first grade and let her repeat kindergarten? Will your child benefit from being held back?
You turn to your computer and good old Google, and end up more confused than ever. The reason? There is a vast amount of scientific research showing that children do not benefit by being held back in grade school. But there is very little out there about holding a child back in kindergarten to wait another year before starting first grade. What is out there suggests that schools with a retention policy have a lot of resources and manpower to deal with kids who need a bit more help getting ready for school.
The data also suggests that in spite of having all these resources, and all this manpower, these kids aren’t doing as well as their first grade or second grade classmates, once they make it into those grades. In one study, researchers associated this poor academic performance with repeating kindergarten. The students in this study, however, had a far higher rate of learning disabilities than their peers. It seems realistic to suggest that repeating kindergarten may not be the reason for the poor school performance. It could be the learning disabilities that make it hard for kids to get good grades.
Perhaps these students who repeated kindergarten and have learning disabilities still do better in school than they would have, had they not repeated kindergarten. It would be nice to have a study to prove this one way or the other. It’s important to note that learning disabilities may not be diagnosed until the child progresses to grade school.
http://www.kars4kids.org/blog/repeat-kindergarten-giving-your-child-more-time-to-grow/