Grade Retention and Seventh-Grade Depression Symptoms in the Course of School Dropout among High-Risk Adolescents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relationship between grade retention and adolescent depression in the course of school dropout is poorly understood. Improving knowledge of the mechanisms involving these variables would shed light on at-risk youth development. This study examines whether depression in adolescence moderates the relationship between grade retention and school dropout in a high-risk sample. Seventh-grade students (n = 453) from two low-SES secondary schools in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) were followed from 2000 to 2006. Self-reported lifetime and seventh-grade depression were measured with the Inventory to Diagnose Depression. Primary school grade retention, and secondary school dropout status was obtained through the Ministry of Education of Quebec registries. Sixteen percent of participants reported lifetime depression, and 13% reported depression in seventh-grade. Nearly one third (32%) of the sample dropped out of school. Logistic regression models were used to estimate moderation effects predicting school dropout six years later. Findings indicated that students with grade retention were 5.54 times more likely to drop out of school. Depression in seventh grade increased by 2.75 times the likelihood of school dropout. The probability of dropping out for adolescents combining both grade retention and seventh-grade depression was 7.26 times higher than it was for those reporting grade retention only. The moderating effect of depression was similar for boys and girls. Depression is a significant vulnerability factor of low educational attainment aggravating the risk associated with grade retention. Experiencing depression at the beginning of secondary school can interfere with school perseverance particularly for students who experienced early academic failure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".