Relative Age Essay

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Applying the sports analysis on relative age to academics is quickly revealed to be a flawed approach. In athletics, it’s simple; if you’re older, bigger, and stronger, you can probably hit a baseball a longer way than your smaller competitors. However, the academic playing field has a tendency to even the odds.
At first glance, there is some evidence that the redshirted children perform better initially (Zill, Loomis, & West, 1997, p. 40). However, unlike in sports, the effect doesn’t last. Erikson Institute President Emeritus Samuel Meisels states, “as children get older…whatever advantage is conferred by starting school a year older decreases dramatically” (Safer, 2012). One study by Oshima and Domaleski (2006) compares students with summer birthdays against children with prior fall birthdays to determine the effect of age on …show more content…

In other words, is it really advantageous for a child to be older than his classmates, or is any performance gain really just a product of having another year of life experience to draw on? Cascio and Schanzenbach (2007) examine precisely this issue. They study evidence that older children tend to outscore younger children on tests, but do not see evidence that relative age had an effect (p. 1). At first glance, this seems like a conflict, but it’s not. They explain that being older helps children do better, simply because they are older and more developed, but that has nothing to do with how old they are relative to the other children. To distinguish these effects, they take advantage of an existing study called Project STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Ratio) (p. 2). The study contains sufficient data to separate simply being older from being older than classmates, and also covers a long enough time frame that they can observe performance in later grades. Their conclusions show redshirting accomplishes the opposite of the desired

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