Abstract

Within education and sport a ubiquitous policy, annual age grouping, is used to group youths into one year cohorts using a cut-off date. Those born early in the selection year can be up to 12 months older than their cohort peers, a phenomena termed ‘relative age’ differences. Relative age differences have been implicated with a number of short and long term developmental outcomes in sport (e.g., elite athlete development) and education (e.g., academic achievement). In this investigation, we summarize two studies examining whether relative age in education and/or sport affected the likelihood of enrolling into higher education sport science or kinesiology programs within Germany and England. In Study 1, there was a disproportionate number of relatively older students (as determined by sport cut-off dates) choosing to study sport science in Germany. However, these results were not replicated in an English sample (Study 2), nor were relative age effects found for academic performance. These results highlight the complex relationships between relative age, contexts and developmental outcomes, and stress the need for further research. Verf.-Referat