Benefits of Knowing the Bible Well

Elementary Student Achievement

Study Selection

Elementary School Achievement Study Selection

The creation and sustaining of achievement at the elementary school level is one of the most important and pivotal things that can be done to create and sustain lifelong success. As such, the factors and facets that make or break such achievement are sought out, analyzed and heavily focused on by scholars, teachers and parents alike. One way in which this paradigm is analyzed and looked at is the trajectory of lesser-achieving students and how they fare as they age and progress. Specifically, it is assessed how "holding back" a student in a grade for another year is damaging or helpful in the long run. While having a student repeat a grade can be damaging to self-esteem, pushing on a student that is not prepared for the next level just hurts that student as well as everyone else. The applicability of the research towards the broader topic being proposed by the author of this report as well as the submission guidelines for the journal in which the research appears will all be covered.

Article Selected

The article reviewed for this report reviews the tactic of "holding back" a child that is clearly not at the level necessary to pass on to the next grade, based either in standardized test results and/or overall performance on concepts that a student at the grade level in question should know, and how this tactic is effective or ineffective based on where precisely in the child's schooling that the holding back occurs. The study found that it works quite well if done early on with the first grade on back being the best. The quality of outcomes is not nearly as rosy if it happens in second, third or fourth grade. The fifth and sixth grades were not looked at in this particular study (Moser, West & Hughes, 2012).

Journal Editorial Guidelines

The editorial guidelines for the Journal of Educational Psychology, the source of the study quickly summarized above, are not complex but are fairly firm. They have a "masked review" policy whereby the identities of the authors and the reviewers are all masked from view during the review process. The same goes for the educational affiliations of the author. The responsibility for the masking of the author information falls on the author and not on the American Psychological Association (APA, 2014). The study selected from the above-named journal is absolutely relevant to the research in question as it covers one of the main remedies used to deal with students that are clearly not achieving at a level that is consistent with what the child should know given their age and grade level. Of course, the stakes are high because once a student falls behind, it becomes harder and harder over the years to get them caught up.

Conclusion