Social promotion

rdf:langString Social promotion

rdf:langString Social promotion is the practice of promoting a student (usually a general education student, rather than a special education student) to the next grade after the current school year, regardless of if they learned the necessary material or if they are often absent. This is done in order to keep the students with their peers by age, that being the intended social grouping. It is sometimes referred to as promotion based on seat time, or the amount of time the child spent sitting in school. This is based on the enrollment criteria for Kindergarten, which is being 4 or 5 years old (5 or 6 years old for 1st graders) at the beginning of the school year. The intention is for the students to be able to graduate from high school level education before their 19th birthday. Advocates of social promotion argue that promotion is done in order not to harm the students' or their classmates' self-esteem, to encourage socialization by age (together with their age cohort), to facilitate student involvement in sports teams, or to promote a student who is weak in one subject on the basis of strength in the other areas. In Canada and the United States, social promotion is normally limited to primary education, because comprehensive secondary education is more flexible about determining which level of students take which classes due to the graduation requirements, which makes the concept of social promotion much less meaningful. For example, student can study with his age cohort in social studies but with younger students in math class (based on his math level assessment, summative or formative). In some countries, grade retention is allowed when students haven't learned the necessary material or if they are often absent. The opposite of social promotion would be to promote students once they learned the necessary material. This might be called "merit promotion", similar to the concept of a "merit civil service". The scope of the promotion might then be either to the next grade or to the next course in the same field. In a curriculum based on grades, this is usually called "mid-term promotion". In a curriculum based on courses rather than grades, the promotion is open-ended and is better understood as satisfying a prerequisite for the next course.