> The real reason she was such a good student in 1st grade is because she was just older.
That may be an intuitive reasoning but not sure it holds true. I have seen numerous times the youngest students performing actually better in class than older ones. Do you have hard data to support this ?
I have no hard data, but I have 10 years of anecdotal data (my wife was a 4th grade teacher for ten years and saw just about 1000 students over her career).
She says the younger kids definitely do worse by all measures in 4th grade, in large part because of their lack of maturity.
That may be an intuitive reasoning but not sure it holds true. I have seen numerous times the youngest students performing actually better in class than older ones. Do you have hard data to support this ?