I need help calculating retained earnings? I'm having a hard time understanding this topic in my accounting class.

Basically Retained Earnings is the Net Income for the year that is retained in the business.

Since this is for class, the information you have available to calculate it could consist of different things.

It's basically the beginning balance, plus net income off the income statement (or minus net loss), less dividends declared, which gives you ending balance.

But that's real life.

But problems in books can do all kinds of weird things, so that may not be anything close to what you need.