The decision for grade retention is an important decision in schools since it has an impact on students’ academic career and socio-emotional adjustment (Hall & Hord, 2006; Kelchtermans, 2009). Grade retention is a controversial response to students who are not academically and/or socially ready for the next grade. Given the abundance of research examining the efficacy of grade retention, it is important that the decision for grade retention is a well-informed decision (Kelchtermans, 2009). International research shows that Belgium has high repetition rates in comparison to other European countries (Eurydice, 2011), but there seems to be limited information regarding how these retention decisions are made (Hall & Hord, 2006). It appears that in most schools, the decision to retain is a subjective one, primarily based on teacher appraisal (Beijaard & Verloop, 1996; Hall & Hord, 2006; Verloop, Van Driel, & Meijer, 2001). Since students’ lives are affected profoundly by the decisions that teachers make, the challenge lies in questioning the way teachers make these decisions. Yet, it appears that little is known about teachers’ decision-making (Harteis et al., 2012).
To understand the processes involved in making decisions, decision-theory can be used as an infrastructure (Gati et al. 2010). Research has shown that decisions vary in the degree to which they rely on intuitive and analytical processes (Epstein, 2008; Kahneman & Frederick, 2005; Klein, 2008; Witteman, van den Bercken, Claes, & Godoy, 2009). When teachers make decisions, their search for information may be internal, retrieving knowledge from their intuition, or may be external: collecting data. For many years, decisions of teachers were primarily based on intuition (Creighton 2007, Earl and Katz 2006). The last decade however, a strong belief has grown among a wide variety of stakeholders that the quality of decisions increases in proportion to the extent to which these decisions are based on data (Schildkamp & Ehren, 2013). In practice, the intuitive and data-based grounds of teachers’ decisions are interrelated and cannot be separated from one another (Spencer, Detrich, & Slocum, 2012). According to Whitehurst (2002) data-based decision making needs to integrate the professional wisdom of the teacher with the best available data in making decisions. Professional wisdom can help weighting the best available data in relation to values and contextual factors and refines the source of information by retaining relevant and valuable data and discarding the rest (Spencer et al., 2012). However, this may bring possible pitfalls. Teachers often suffer from information overload. Therefore they might use heuristics – cognitive short cuts – which allow easier procedures to reach to a decision (Kahneman & Frederick, 2005; Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). According to Kahneman and Frederick (2005) errors of intuitive decision making can be detected and corrected by the rational part of decision making. Data-based decision making can challenge and complement intuitive judgments by collecting and analyzing data to add additional information to the process, before the decision is made (L Earl & Louis, 2013).
Because of the high stakes involved with the decision for grade retention there is a need for thoughtful, defensible decisions preceded by the analysis of different information sources. In the case of data-based decision making in schools, previous research focused predominantly on the perspective of school leaders (Day et al., 2008; Stevens, Brown, Knibbs, & Smith, 2005). There is a need for research on the equally important perspective of teachers (Downey & Kelly, 2011). Therefore, this study sets out to explore and explain the role of intuition and data in the decision-making processes of teachers.
