Do students in a looping classroom get higher grades and report a better teacher-student relationship than those in a traditional setting?

ABSTRACT

This study compared the academic achievement and teacher-student relationship of students who remained with the same teacher for two consecutive years in so-called looping classrooms (n = 98), to their peers in traditional one-year classrooms (n = 94). Contrary to prior research on the topic, this study used a strict protocol to ensure that teachers in looping and regular classrooms had similar profiles and valued similar educational practices. Results revealed that students who experienced looping had higher school grades in mathematics and writing and marginally better grades in reading compared to their counterparts schooled in annual classrooms. However, results regarding the teacher-student relationship were inconsistent and did not provide clear evidence in favour of either looping or annual settings. Overall, looping appears to be a quite simple and inexpensive measure likely to provide benefits on students’ academic achievement. Such findings provide support for expanding looping programmes in elementary schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Looping classroom
• elementary school
• school achievement
• teacher-student relationship
• teaching practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It should be noted that in the province of Quebec, schools receive a socioeconomic index based on the proportion of families in which the mother does not have a high school diploma (2/3 of the index) and the proportion of families with parental unemployment (2/3 of the index). An index of 1 is given to the most privileged schools, and an index of 10 is given to the most underprivileged schools. Schools with an index of 8, 9, and 10 are considered underprivileged and receive funding to improve the available of pedagogical resources, whereas other schools do not. In this study, schools with an index of 8, 9, and 10 were considered underprivileged, while schools with an index of 5, 6, and 7 were considered not underprivileged (or privileged). None of the schools in the sample had an index of 1, 2, 3, or 4.

2. As mentioned above, it should be noted that the socioeconomic index was recoded to differentiate between students from underprivileged areas (schools with an index of 8, 9, or 10) and students from more privileged areas (schools with an index of 5, 6, or 7).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by a scholarship for the Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture [135630].