Research: All nonsense!? (Education Myths Part 4) (Story)

Would you have known? It was 2.4 per cent of all pupils.

For episode 4 of Education Myths, psychologist Jana Asberger examines the benefits of repeating a grade. At first, the idea sounds plausible: underachievement is to be made up for and school classes become more homogeneous if only pupils above a certain performance level are transferred.

Empirical educational research, however, shows that "sitting out" is a questionable measure. For example, because the pupils then also repeat learning content of subjects in which they are already sufficiently competent, which hinders rather than promotes their learning progress.

In addition, repeating a class can have a negative effect on the "academic self-concept", the self-confidence and the joy of learning of the repeaters, especially for social and emotional reasons.

So what to do?

A number of educational researchers in Germany therefore advocate the use of alternative measures. In order to make up for deficiencies in performance in the long term, it is more promising to determine the individual performance prerequisites and learning developments of the pupils concerned and to adapt learning opportunities accordingly.

to the blog post "It's all nonsense! Part 4