Effects of kindergarten retention on children's social-emotional development: An application of propensity score method to multivariate, multilevel data.

Abstract

This study examines the effects of kindergarten retention on children's social-emotional development in the early, middle, and late elementary years. Previous studies have generated mixed results partly due to some major methodological challenges, including selection bias, measurement error, and divergent perceptions of multiple respondents in different domains of child development. The authors address these challenges by using propensity score stratification to contend with selection bias and by embedding measurement models in hierarchical models to account for measurement error and to model dependence among observations. The authors' analyses of a series of multivariate models enable them to compare the retention effects across different respondents over different time points. In general, the results show no evidence suggesting that kindergarten retention does harm to children's social-emotional development. Rather, the findings suggest that, had the retained kindergartners been promoted to the first grade instead, they would possibly have developed a lower level of self-confidence and interest in reading and all school subjects 2 years later and would have displayed a higher level of internalizing problem behaviors at the end of the treatment year and 2 years later.