A large literature documents that there are significant academic and non-academic differences between the youngest and oldest students in a school cohort. This paper investigates if being the youngest in a cohort has any impact on an individual's propensity to commit crime by utilizing a data set that contains over 4 million arrest records…

The present research attempted to investigate the impacts of gender and age on the freshly-graduated eighth graders' percentiles in the central high school entrance exam (LGS) in 2020. The sample of this causal-comparative study comprised 6,039 students selected from secondary schools in Isparta who took the LGS in 2020. The data were obtained…

Grade retention has been the focus of the education debate in Spain for decades. On average, more than 30% of students have repeated at least one grade before they finish (or dropout from) their compulsory studies. The present research provides new evidence on this issue by investigating the influence of Spain's school entry age upon students'…

There is growing evidence that school starting age impacts children's likelihood of receiving special education services, but less is known about variations in this effect. Using a regression discontinuity design, I found that the youngest students in a kindergarten cohort are 40% more likely (p < 0.001) to be placed in special education than…

Background/Context: The age at which children can enter kindergarten continues to be discussed in both educational research and practice, and the debate for whether to increase kindergarten entry age remains active on both sides. A critical oversight has been the lack of attention paid towards entry age for those students who begin school with a…

In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of an extra year of schooling on mathematics performance for seven Latin American countries based on PISA 2012. To that end we exploit exogenous variation in students' birthdates around the school entry cut-off date using both sharp and fuzzy Regression Discontinuity designs. We find strong effects of…

This study investigated whether there are significant differences between reading achievements of 15-year-old students and starting age for preschool and socioeconomic factors according to the results from the PISA 2015 and 2018. The quantitative results show that there is a clear and statistically significant difference between reading test…

Using an unanticipated policy reform in Mexico that shifted 4 months the cutoff date for elementary school eligibility in 2006 and information on academic performance of 15-year-old students from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 survey, who entered first grade in 2006, this paper estimates the effects of starting…

This research investigated whether delayed school entry was associated with higher achievement in national tests of reading and numeracy in Grades 3, 5, 7, and 9 (n = 2,823). Delayed entry was related to advantages in reading (0.14 SD) and numeracy (0.08 SD) at Grade 3, although little variance was explained (1%-2%). This slight advantage…

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…

Purpose: We investigated the roles of leisure reading and word reading ability in vocabulary and reading comprehension development in 598 adolescents at ages 10, 11, and 12 (285 girls, 313 boys). Method: Structural equation modeling was used to test whether word reading was associated with vocabulary and reading comprehension: a) directly; b)…

The study aimed to determine the levels of mathematics proficiency among Saudi learners and to compare them with the learners' levels of the first country globally (B-S-J-Z -- China) and regionally (UAE) according to the results of PISA 2018, as well as to identify some of the learners' characteristics that affected their results and their…

The timing of children's start to school is the interest of researchers, policy-makers and especially parents. Researches on this issue have recently pointed to the concept of relative age effect (RAE). The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of RAE on mathematics achievement in Turkey. In order to accomplish this purpose, the…

High school graduation rates are a central policy topic in the United States and have been shown to be stagnant for the past three decades. Using student-level administrative data from New York City Public Schools, I examine the impact of compulsory school attendance on high school graduation rates and grade attainment, focusing the analysis on…

This study analyzes the effect of age-based retention on school achievement at different stages of education. I estimate an instrumental variable model, using the predicted probability of retention given month of birth as an instrument, while simultaneously accounting for the effect of month of birth on maturity at the time of testing. The…