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…

Due in part to the challenges associated with learning a new language, English language learners (ELLs) typically begin school with lower achievement than their non-ELL peers, and those achievement gaps often close slowly if at all. A separate body of research shows that achievement is associated with social-emotional learning constructs like…

Background/Context: Closing achievement gaps is a major concern in U.S. education. These gaps can develop in a wide range of ways over the course of a student's schooling. Yet, research on school effectiveness and accountability policies for schools often focuses on rank orderings of schools based on value-added models, which could mask those…

Educational stakeholders have long known that students might not be fully engaged when taking an achievement test and that such disengagement could undermine the inferences drawn from observed scores. Thanks to the growing prevalence of computer-based tests and the new forms of metadata they produce, researchers have developed and validated…

Important educational policy decisions, like whether to shorten or extend the school year, often require accurate estimates of how much students learn during the year. Yet, related research relies on a mostly untested assumption: that growth in achievement is linear throughout the entire school year. We examine this assumption using a dataset…

Background/Context: Achievement gaps motivate a range of practices and policies aimed at closing those gaps. Most gaps studies assume that differences in observed test scores across subgroups are measuring differences in content mastery. For such an assumption to hold, students in the subgroups being compared need to be giving similar effort on…

Students' level of academic skills at school entry are a strong predictor of later academic success, and focusing on improving these skills during the preschool years has been a priority during the past 10 years. Evidence from two prior nationally representative studies indicated that incoming kindergarteners' math and literacy skills were higher…

Leveraging achievement data measured in the fall and spring of kindergarten through eighth grade for 840,000 students attending 8,800 public schools, we report novel evidence on how achievement and growth patterns differ between rural and nonrural schools. Rural students start kindergarten slightly ahead of nonrural students but fall behind by…

This study estimated male-female and Black-White achievement gaps without accounting for low test motivation, then compared those estimates to ones that used several approaches to addressing rapid guessing. Researchers investigated two issues: (1) The differences in rates of rapid guessing across subgroups and (2) How much achievement gap…