Research Findings: Relying on a newly released national data set of kindergarten students from the 2010-2011 school year (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011), the findings suggest that having a greater percentage of same-needs classmates positively boosts both achievement and socioemotional outcomes among…

Empirically, the link between classmate ability and individual-level student achievement has been established. And yet, within the scope of this body of literature, there is a dearth of studies examining if a relationship also persists between classmate ability and non-achievement outcomes--that is, social skills. This article fills this research…

In evaluating the deleterious effects of missing in-school time, research has almost exclusively focused on absences, and almost no attention has been paid to tardiness. Hence, this study contributes a new dimension to the field by examining the effects of student tardiness on academic achievement. Employing an empirical model on a large-scale,…

Despite the vast body of research examining the relationship between full-day kindergarten attendance and children's outcomes, little is known about the effects of full-day kindergarten on children with disabilities (i.e., students with 1 of the 13 categories of disabilities recognized under federal law). This study fills this research void by…

The authors explored how classroom gender composition moderated the relationship between having classmates with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) and peers' academic achievement in both kindergarten and Grade 1 classrooms. Given the behavioral and social-cognitive styles of girls, it was hypothesized that classrooms with a higher percentage…

Numerous studies have examined how grade retention can impede the academic success of those retained students. One uncharted line of research is the spillover effect that retained students may exert on their classmates. The purpose of this study is to evaluate this relationship for students in urban elementary school classrooms. To do so, this…

While an emerging body of research has examined the effects of school absences on student outcomes, there is comparatively little research examining the different reasons contributing to school absence, how common these reasons are, and the extent to which different types of absences are differentially associated with achievement. To address these…

There is evidence suggesting that missing school negatively relates to academic achievement. However, it is a difficult task to derive unbiased empirical estimates of absences in their influence on performance. One particular challenge arises from the unobserved heterogeneity in the family environment, which may relate to both absence behavior and…

Background/Context: This article addresses the classroom contextual effects of absences on student achievement. Previous research on peer effects has predominantly focused on peer socioeconomic status or classroom academic ability and its effects on classmates. However, the field has been limited by not discerning the individual-level academic…

This paper will address several gaps in the literature. First, those studies that have attempted to hone in on the relationship between student attendance and achievement in K-12 education have been conducted only at the aggregate level of analysis. Although these papers have provided insight into how attendance may be related to achievement,…