The COVID-19 pandemic led to notable disruptions in student learning, particularly in mathematics, impacting students from marginalized backgrounds. This quasi-experimental quantitative study examines whether the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) Mathematics results from 2019 to 2024 indicate that students have recovered…

Global and national education agendas are concerned with improving the quality and equality of learning outcomes. School systems involuntarily continue to produce new and perpetuate existing inequities and injustices, particularly for minority students. While previous research has highlighted the potential causes and effects of educational…

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…

Graduating from high school is an important step toward becoming a successful adult. It is evidence that one has met the standards set by the public school system. Standards-Based Reform has been pursued since the 1980s and culminated in the development of the Common Core State Standards that were implemented by most states between 2011 and 2015.…

Reducing the standardised test score gap between ethnic minority and majority students remains a global challenge in education. Research on this matter is sparse in Nepal, where ethnic minorities comprise the country's majority population but experience systemic oppression. We hypothesised that the lack of proportional teacher diversity has…

Every child has a right to education, and their skin color should not determine their education quality. However, since the landmark case of "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954), it has been proven that race continues to matter in the success and failure of education (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). The persistent achievement gaps…

Student-Centred Active Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies (SCALE-UP) is a set of collaborative learning techniques that are shown to reduce the continuation and awarding gaps between students of Black, Asian and other Minority Ethnicities (BAME) and White students when SCALE-UP is implemented throughout every module in an…

Attention paid to awarding gaps in higher education linked to ethnicity tends to focus on outcomes at the final award stage. Our project sought to scrutinise awarding gaps at module level where these gaps may emerge. Our aim was twofold: to identify the most important barriers to student success and determine strategies to reduce awarding gaps at…

The present study examined Latinx school readiness and 3rd grade student achievement, considering differences based on social categories of gender, race, ethnicity, and home language. The sample included 683 racially diverse children (M[subscript age] = 4.94; SD = 0.57) of Dominican- or Mexican-origin from Spanish-English or Spanish-only…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program only reports state-level subgroup results if it samples at least 62 students identifying with the subgroup. Since some subgroups constitute small proportions of many states' general student populations, these minority subgroups are seldom sufficiently sampled to meet this sample size…

Background: This empirical study aims to investigate the association between mathematics self-efficacy and mathematics achievement gaps among students in Grades 4, 8, and 12, utilizing data from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The study also considers student-level (e.g., mathematics self-efficacy, gender,…

In postsecondary education, ethnic and racial disparities in student academic outcomes have continued to be of urgent concern in the current context of changing demographics, racial injustice, and economic realities. Despite knowing the effects of educators' role on students' sense of belonging and impact of culturally relevant pedagogies on…

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…

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…

Significant racial and ethnic achievement gaps exist between students in the U.S. by elementary school, although the underlying causes for these achievement gaps differ. One factor for racial/ethnic achievement gaps is between-group differences in socioeconomic status (SES), particularly exposure to poverty. Moreover, other factors contributing to…