Age is Not Just a Number

I’m pretty bad with numbers so it used to drive me crazy when parents would refer to their children’s ages in terms of months, i.e., 15 months, 20 months, etc. But once I had my daughter I learned why parents used months instead of just rounding to the closest year. In the world of Pediatrics age is an important tool for gauging growth and development.

In the world of education age is an important tool for gauging kindergarten readiness. So much so that birth month alone can determine whether a child starts kindergarten on time or, if already in kindergarten, stays there another year. However, after first grade age is suddenly no longer considered and students are treated as if they have all reached the same levels of development and maturity.

When my daughter’s academic struggles began to appear in kindergarten, I remember thinking that she seemed almost a year behind the rest of her class. Reading Outliers: the Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, gave credence to that gut feeling.

In its entirety, Outliers looks at the many advantages that affect success. In the chapter “The Matthew Effect” Gladwell writes about how cut-off dates and relative age affect success.

In the mid-80’s, Canadian psychologist, Roger Barnsley noticed “an incredible number of January, February, and March birth dates” among the elite players of Canada’s junior hockey league. (pp. 21-22) The more he looked into the phenomenon the more he saw that the majority of the elite players had birthdays closest to the age-class hockey cutoff date of January 1st. (p.24) If a boy turns 10 on January 2nd he is grouped with kids who are going to be 10 in one month, 6 months, up to 11 months (almost a year) later. So when coaches start to pick the most talented players from this age-group for the all-star teams, what they are really doing is choosing the oldest players who are more physically mature and better coordinated then their younger teammates. (p. 24)

"Barnsley argues that these kinds of skewed age distributions exist whenever three things happen: selection, streaming, and differentiated experience. If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the ‘talented’ from the ‘untalented’; and if you provide the ‘talented’ with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date." (p. 25)

After this illustration of the effect of relative age in hockey, Gladwell goes on to show how relative age affects students. Economists, Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey, compared the relationship between student scores on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, TIMSS, (math and science tests given every four years to children in many countries), and month of birth: (p. 28)

"They found that among fourth graders, the oldest children scored somewhere between four and twelve percentile points better than the youngest children. That, as Dhuey explains, is a ‘huge effect.’ It means that if you take two intellectually equivalent fourth graders with birthdays at opposite ends of the cutoff date, the older student could score in the eightieth percentile, while the younger one could score in the sixty-eighth percentile. That’s the difference between qualifying for a gifted program and not.” (p. 28)

“Dhuey and Bedard subsequently did the same analysis … looking at college. What did they find? At four-year colleges in the United States . . . students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are under-represented by about 11.6 percent. That initial difference in maturity doesn’t go away with time. It persists. And for thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college … and not. … 'It’s outlandish that our arbitrary choice of cutoff dates is causing these long-lasting effects, and no one seems to care about them,'" [Dhuey says]. (pp. 29-30)

With such marked differences in development and maturity at the kindergarten and first grade level, elementary school teachers don’t like to mention the possibility of learning disabilities because they don’t want to confuse maturity with ability. My daughter’s kindergarten and 1st grade teachers proceeded to do just that anyway. If they had compared my daughter to only the students of the same relative age as her instead of her whole class where the relative ages could differ by over a year, they may have been more likely to see red-flags in her academic progress.

Gladwell makes a suggestion for dealing with relative age that makes sense:

Elementary and middle schools could put the January through April-born students in one class, the May through August in another class, and those born in September through December in a third class. They could let students learn with and compete against other students of the same maturity level. (p.33)

Though relative age is just a small part of the problems in the school system, acknowledging it in elementary and middle school could mean real education reform.