The purpose of this study was to explore the reading performance scores of elementary school students in one school district before and after school closures due to COVID-19. This nonexperimental, exploratory study of quantitative, archival data was designed to explore a single cohort (N = 2,006) of third- through fifth-grade students' i-Ready…

According to a 2017 article by Peters and colleagues, millions of students have already demonstrated they know the material slated to be taught that year. Consequently, grade-level standards are unlikely to be appropriately challenging for these students. In this paper, we conceptually replicated and extended this prior study. Using data from…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education worldwide as educational systems made the decision to close schools to contain the spread of the virus. The duration of school closures varied greatly internationally. In this study, we use representative trend data from more than 300,000 students in 29 countries to examine whether the cross-country…

To make up for pandemic-related learning losses, many U.S. public school districts have increased enrollment in their summer school programs. We assess summer school as a strategy for COVID-19 learning recovery by tracking the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts serving 400,000 students. Based on…

This study examined how COVID-19 impacted elementary schools' reading achievement in rural school districts in South Carolina. The study employed the comparative research design to investigate differences between reading achievement before and after COVID-19 of rural elementary schools regarding gender and racial ethnicity. The methodology of this…

COVID-19-related school closures worldwide had an enormous impact on literacy instruction and learning. In this article, we share an overview of what research tells us about what happened to elementary learners' reading comprehension during these school closures and what reading comprehension instruction looked like in homes and schools during…

By the end of 2021, more than 168 million students across the globe had missed a year of face-to-face schooling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In NSW, Australia, most students engaged in learning from home for eight weeks during 2020 and a further 14 weeks during 2021. This study provides robust empirical evidence on how two years of disruptions to…

In education, among the most anticipated consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are that student performance will stagnate or decline and that existing inequities will increase. Although some studies suggest a decline in student performance and widening learning gaps, the picture is less clear than expected. In this study, we add to the existing…

The purpose of this study was to discover the relationship between individual student reading levels to mathematics levels utilizing the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, STAAR, scores for third- and fourth-grade students before and after the COVID-19 pandemic school closures. The study had four research questions examining third-…

The purpose of this qualitative study is to determine how four rural school districts in East Tennessee worked to implement the third-grade retention law within their understanding and interpretation of the law to the benefit of the students and overall communities they serve. The study used a semi-structured questionnaire format conducted with a…

Education, alongside the method by which instruction has been proposed, continues to shift, changing how educators instruct, schools operate, and, therefore, the success and growth by which students can progress due to the global pandemic. The ever-changing dynamic of the current state of education places constant strain on pedagogues to…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences between face-to-face learning environments before the pandemic during the 2018-2019 school year and varied learning modalities after the pandemic during the 2020-2021 school year. NWEA MAP Growth data was collected for third-grade students in elementary schools in a rural school district…

Kazakhstan experienced significant modifications to its education system in response to the outbreak of COVID-19, involving widespread school closures in the 18 months between March 2020 and September 2021. The purpose of this study is to estimate the loss of learning for seven different subjects due to the pandemic restrictions. Based on a large…

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a seismic and ongoing disruption to K-12 schooling. Using test scores from 5.4 million U.S. students in Grades 3-8, we tracked changes in math and reading achievement across the first 2 years of the pandemic. Average math test scores in the fall of 2021 in Grades 3-8 were 0.20-0.27 standard deviation (SD) lower…

To make up for pandemic-related learning losses, many U.S. public school districts have increased enrollment in their summer school programs. We assess summer school as a strategy for COVID-19 learning recovery by tracking the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts serving 400,000 students. Based on…