Background/Context: Many states, school districts, and third-party platforms report measures of school performance. Such school ratings are widely consulted by parents and educators alike. The ratings appear to affect families' choices of where to live and where to enroll students (Bergman and Hill, 2018; Hasan and Kumar, 2019), as well as…

Community violence exposure is associated with externalizing problems in adolescents, yet little research has examined the moderating role of coping in these relationships. Eighty-four low-income, urban adolescents (M[subscript age] = 13.36, 50% male, 95% African American) participated in two waves of a longitudinal study a year and a half apart.…

Four of the eight Engineering Standards in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS, 2013) focus on authentic science communication: "asking questions (science) and defining problems (engineering), analyzing and interpreting data, constructing explanations (for science) and designing solutions (for engineering), engaging in argument from…

A positive school climate is strongly associated with enhanced student outcomes. With the disengagement of Black and Latinx youth living in poverty being at an all-time high, participation in sport-based youth development (SBYD) programs may enhance school climate, while capitalizing on existing interests. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to…

There are many important questions teachers and administrators need to ask as they grapple with how to ensure high school graduates are college and career ready. What does it mean to prepare students for a world that is rapidly changing--a world in which science and technology are altering how we live, work, play, and interact? If teachers focus…

From 2010 onwards, most US states have aligned their education standards by adopting the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for math and English Language Arts. The CCSS did not target other subjects such as science and social studies. We estimate spillovers of the CCSS on student achievement in non-targeted subjects in models with state and year…

This research study was conducted to gain a better understanding of teacher perceptions, in both low-performing and high-performing urban charter schools, of the impact of administrative support, professional development, and teacher preparation in closing the achievement gap among fourth grade students. The trend over the last five years among…

This brief provides a policy perspective into the recent NWEA research on how COVID-19 has affected student learning. It builds on previous research showing achievement levels stalling over the 2022-23 school year from the previous year. This analysis on student learning from grades 3-8 shows that academic recovery has stalled for older learners…

Is under-representation of Black, Latinx, English learners (EL), and students from economically challenging communities in gifted programs due to inequality in early academic achievement or bias in the gifted identification process? Using three-level multilevel logistic models, we examine the degree to which the disparities in gifted…

Over the last few decades, scholars have conceptualized academic struggle, including learning disabilities, as socially constructed. When students, especially students of color, are constructed as struggling with school-based literacy, they can experience a variety of negative outcomes including higher dropout rates. In an attempt to unpack how…

In this report, the authors present the results of a long-term tracking study that follows 1,177 students who applied to enter 1 of 13 oversubscribed Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) middle schools through a 5th or 6th grade admissions lottery in 2008 or 2009. Those students are now old enough to have attended college for at least two years. This…

New research, using data from 7 million students in grades 3-8 in 25,000 schools who took MAP Growth reading and mathematics assessments between 2020-21 and fall 2022, continues NWEA's ongoing research agenda examining how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected student achievement in reading and math. At the start of the 2022-23 school year, we…

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, "Progress toward Pandemic Recovery: Continued Signs of Rebounding Achievement at the Start of the 2022-23 School Year" (ED627355). The two main research questions…

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, "Learning during COVID-19: An Update on Student Achievement and Growth at the Start of the 2021-22 School Year." The goal of this brief is to summarize student achievement…

This study aims at disentangling the effects of status generalization and social identity processes on ability perceptions among early adolescents. Double standards theory predicts that people use different standards for making inferences about others' abilities based on social status. Social identity processes, however, imply that people evaluate…