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Little Impact Seen in Multiyear Teacher Assignments on Early Elementary Students
by Joe Savrock (June 2005)

“Look before you loop!”

These are the words of caution for administrators who are considering the implementation of multiyear teacher assignments, also known as looping, in their elementary schools.

Looping is an intervention that calls for elementary school students to remain with the same teacher during two or more grades. The concept employs instructional strategies aimed at increasing student achievement and positive learning behaviors.

Proponents of looping suggest that the intervention increases the amount of instructional time, an important factor in improving children’s academic achievement. Looping is cost-effective and is relatively easy to implement, and it has been adopted by numerous school districts nationwide.

However, looping appears to have little positive effect on children’s academic achievement, attendance rates, and learning behavior during the first two grades of elementary school, according to research headed by a Penn State faculty member.

Barbara A. Schaefer, associate professor of educational & school psychology, worked with former Penn State graduate student Rachael A. Khoury ‘99 EK ED, ‘01 M.Ed., and Marika Ginsburg-Block, assistant professor of school psychology at the University of Delaware. In their study, titled “Does Looping Make the Grade? A Preliminary Study of the Effects of Multiyear Assignment on Academic Achievement, School Attendance, and Learning Behaviors,” the investigators sought to determine whether students who remain with the same teacher for consecutive years are better off.

Barbara Schaefer

The investigators made a comparison of students at two elementary schools in the DuBois Area School District in central Pennsylvania. One of the schools had implemented looping and the other had not. At the looping school, 48 children remained with the same teacher for both first and second grades. These students were compared with 88 children at the non-looping school who had different teachers for first and second grades.

The students were measured on reading and mathematics achievement, learning behavior, and attendance—both at the beginning of their first-grade year and again at the end of their second-grade year. Schaefer and her colleagues used standardized testing to measure the students’ academic achievement in reading and mathematics and to assess cognitive ability in skills such as verbal reasoning, verbal comprehension, pictorial reasoning, figural reasoning, and quantitative reasoning.

To assess the children’s learning behavior, the investigators asked the teachers to rate the students on specific learning-related behaviors along four factor-analytically derived dimensions: competence motivation, attitude toward learning, attention/persistence, and strategy/flexibility.

The investigators also examined the students’ school attendance records.

The researchers found that, after the two-year period, looping did not have any significant effect on the students’ reading and math achievement, learning behaviors, or attendance rates.

Schaefer points to the significance of her team’s findings in light of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which focuses on positive achievement outcomes for students and encourages interventions that are backed by proven scientific support. “With federal legislation such as NCLB, school districts are under substantial pressure to show improvement in their students’ academic functioning,” she said. “Not surprisingly, many are adopting new programs to address this need. Unfortunately, many of the programs selected have failed to demonstrate sufficient empirical evidence to support their use.”

Schaefer added that, “The DuBois Area School District is commended for taking steps to implement and evaluate this program, and it really serves as a model for applied community-university research that can inform educational practices. By incorporating sound research design in the implementation of the looping program, we were able to account for pre-existing differences between the comparison school classes and those that looped. Our findings were equivocal, as looping didn’t demonstrate any positive—or negative—impact on the outcome variables measured.”

Since there is limited scientific support for the benefits of looping, administrators might wish to consider alternative interventions.

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