Too Late or Too Soon for School? The Impact of School Entry Age

Abstract

The education laws of each country establish starting cutoff dates for compulsory education which could, potentially, affect students’ academic achievement. Specifically, they could be detrimental for those students whose birthday is just before the school entry cutoff, as they will be the youngest in their classroom, while it could boost the academic performance of those whose birthday is just after (the eldest ones). The present research paper analyses this issue in respect to students’ academic achievement using census and longitudinal data for the most populated region of Spain (Andalusia) with a regression discontinuity methodology. Our results show that those students who are the youngest in the classroom due to this school entry cutoff present lower academic achievement compared to the eldest students, an effect which is reduced while students advance in their education. This motivates policy recommendations aimed at checking students’ cognitive skills prior to their access to compulsory education and at letting parents choose whether or not to delay their children’s access to school in case they are not yet ready.

Keywords:

• Birth date
• regression discontinuity
• students’ academic progression
• census data
• longitudinal research

Notes

1 We find it necessary to indicate that maturity differences are not the sole explanation for differences in academic performance between older and younger students (Navarro et al., 2015): this may also be due to vitamin D deficiencies of children born in winter (Martin et al., 2004), total time spent at school (Lawlor et al., 2006), the slower development of students with learning difficulties (Martin et al., 2004) or lower expectations of teachers for less mature children (Jussim & Harber, 2005), among other reasons.

2 More information about starting dates for many countries can be found in TIMSS 2015: “Exhibit 2: Information About the Students Assessed in TIMSS 2015” (http://timss2015.org/wp-content/uploads/filebase/full%20pdfs/T15-About-TIMSS-2015.pdf).

3 It is worth mentioning that there are other research works (e.g. Luyten et al., 2008, or Anders et al., 2016; among others) which take advantage of this school entry cut-off to analyse the influence on students’ academic performance of one-grade-anticipation of students’ enrollment, i.e. analysing the effect of one additional year of schooling (also called “the effect of schooling”). This would be, for instance, comparing those born on the 31st December, who would be in 6th grade, to those born on the 1st January (one day after but in the following year), who would be in 5th grade.

4 This as good as random distribution of students’ birth date in Andalusia makes students who were born just before and just after the Spanish school entry cut-off date to be similar and differ only in their birth date. However, this cut-off date can make appear an age difference of almost 1 year and, hence, different levels of maturity for students in the same grade, possibly making appear academic performance differences; this is, thus, the subject of our research study.

5 Students who have repeated were identified following the applicable Spanish education law for the school years prior to 2008–2009, i.e., Ley Orgánica 10/2002, de 23 de diciembre, de Calidad de la Educación or LOCE (BOE, 2002), from 2002 to 2006. This law states that students can only repeat once in primary education (BOE, 2002, art. 17.3). The following education law, i.e., Ley Orgánica 2/2006, de 3 de mayo, de Educación or LOE (BOE, 2006), also indicated this (BOE, 2006, art. 20.2) and was applicable from 2006 to 2013.

6 The students that we cannot follow are those who repeated twice between the academic years under analysis (2008–2009 and 2012–2013). Hence, we would need information on 2013–2014 to follow them; unfortunately, this is not possible, as DA was interrupted after the 2012–2013 cycle. Information on the mean differences between the complete 5th grade sample in 2008–2009 and the students who cannot be followed is presented on Table A1 (Appendix). We see that, in fact, these repeater students are low performers and show significant mean differences with the 5th grade sample in almost all the contextual variables under analysis.

7 Concretely, students can repeat only once in primary education—1st to 6th grade—and once in secondary education—7th to 10th grade—(BOE, 2002, 2006).

8 In order to interpret the results’ section, the mean and standard deviation of the population used to standardise students’ scores in each subject and course are provided here: in 2008–2009, the mean score in reading (mathematics in brackets) was 68.14 (48.92) with a standard deviation of 17.21 (12.74); in 2011–2012, the mean score in reading was 78.92 (39.75) with a standard deviation of 18.38 (11.50); in 2012–2013, the mean score in reading was 70.24 (40.78) with a standard deviation of 18.44 (11.92).

9 PISA 2012 showed that Andalusian students presented gender differences in scores, as girls outperformed boys in 26 points in reading, but obtained scores which were 16 points below that of boys in mathematics.

10 This use of a regression discontinuity design which sticks only to the sample around the cut-off has also been employed by many relevant education research studies, e.g. Angrist and Lavy (1999), Ponzo and Scoppa (2014) or Bernardi (2014), among others. However, we will check our results using a non-parametric local linear regression discontinuity, which uses the complete sample information and allows the intercept and slope to differ across the age entry cut-off.

11 It seems that, for the 1-day cut-off, students’ background characteristics are slightly different. This may be due to the smaller number of observations, which has been solved by alternatively increasing the range of days around the school entry cut-off.

12 The difference in observations between 5th and 8th grade estimations is due to differences between grades in the information of reading or mathematics scores that is missing, and to students who repeated twice between 5th grade and 8th grade, who are not included in the 8th grade estimations.

13 The estimations for 8th grade in Table 2 have been calculated using the DA data of the 2011–2012 school year for students who were in 8th grade in the 2011–2012 school year but failed and repeated that grade in 2012–2013. The information of these students in the 2012–2013 school year has been used to replicate these estimations and the results hold. These estimations are displayed in Table A5 (Appendix).

Additional information

Funding

The data used in this research has been provided by Agencia Andaluza de Evaluación Educativa, Consejería de Educación, Junta de Andalucía. This work has been partly supported by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad under Research Project ECO2017-88883-R, the Centro de Estudios Andaluces under Research Project PRY085/19, the FEDER funding under Research Project UMA18FEDERJA024 and the postdoctoral contract from the Plan Propio signed by the Universidad de Málaga.