This brief is a continuation of NWEA's research series examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student achievement and progress toward academic recovery. Initiated in the early phase of the pandemic, this series has leveraged NWEA's large national sample of longitudinal MAP® Growth™ data to track student performance and compare it to…

The share of at-risk students has increased post pandemic requiring a response that matches the magnitude of the impact. High dosage tutoring has been one strategy to address the needs. If implemented effectively and at the proper scale, accelerated academic growth is possible. This brief reviews the collection of research on high dosage tutoring,…

About one in five students in the US attends a rural school, and over half of all school districts are in rural areas. And yet very little is known about achievement, achievement gaps, and academic growth in rural schools, including how school-year and summer changes in achievement may differ in these schools. This lack of information is…

The purpose of this technical appendix is to share more detailed results and to describe more fully the sample and methods used in the research included in the brief, "The Widening Achievement Divide during COVID-19." The authors investigated two main research questions in this brief: (1) To what degree have students' reading and math…

The purpose of this technical appendix is to share detailed results and more fully describe the sample and methods used to produce the research brief, "COVID's Impact on Science Achievement: Trends from 2019 through 2024. We investigated three main research questions in this brief: 1) How did science achievement in 2021 and 2024 compare to…

Using the right assessments for your district is key to tackling achievement gaps. Bay District Schools knows this firsthand. After changing their approach to assessment, they helped struggling students experience phenomenal--and clearly demonstrable--growth. After implementing MAP® Growth™, Bay students at the lower end of the achievement…

This brief continues ongoing research by NWEA® examining the degree to which the COVID-19 pandemic, and its associated school closures, influenced student learning. Prior research focused on math and reading and found that the pandemic's negative impact steadily accumulated during the 2020-2021 school year, with significant disparities in…

This is the technical index for the research brief "Education's Long COVID: 2022-23 Achievement Data Reveal Stalled Progress toward Pandemic Recovery." Using data from 6.7 million U.S. public school students currently in grades 3-8, the study examined academic gains in the 2022-23 school year relative to pre-pandemic years. It also…