The COVID-19 pandemic posed a significant problem for K-12 education. To prevent the spread of the virus, the educational community mandated school closures shifting instructional practices from a traditional face-to-face model into a remote instructional model (Bailey et al., 2021; Bawa, 2020; Domina et al., 2021; Onyema et al., 2020; Wyse et…

As schools reopened in the fall of 2021, educators faced pressure to fill in learning gaps created by unfinished learning. Findings from a qualitative case study of elementary school teachers show that at times teachers felt constrained by the limitations of teaching writing in an online environment; therefore, they were excited about returning to…

This paper presents one elementary school librarian's experience using gamification and game-based learning in the specialist classroom. While the academic literature on gamification and game-based learning is increasing, there has not been much written on using these techniques in the specialist classroom. Using a case study method, the…

It is now well established that the COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating and unequal impact on student achievement. Test score declines were disproportionately large for historically marginalized students, exacerbating preexisting achievement gaps and threatening educational and economic inequality. In this paper, we use longitudinal student-level…

The normal lives of schools were significantly affected by the recent global pandemic. Some countries closed all schools nationally, others such as the USA closed at a local level according to state law. Much of the focus of research in this area is on the effect on children and learning loss, but this paper uses secondary analysis of data from a…

Due to COVID-19, 2020 was a strange and different school year for many students around the world. Based on a survey of primary school students (N = 2665) conducted in December 2020, this article examines students' well-being and stress levels one year after the first COVID-19 outbreak. It also examines how students emotionally relate to the…

In October 2023, the California Department of Education released test scores for all students in Grades 3-8 and 11 for the 2022-23 school year. These results represent an opportunity to analyze whether and to what extent student learning has rebounded after the dramatic declines in scores resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and related school…

In this brief we examine how variability in students' math and reading test scores changed across the pandemic, including whether increased dispersion was concentrated at one part of the test score distribution. Using reading and math assessment data from a sample of 8 million students in grades 3-8 in 24,000 public schools who took MAP Growth…

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 culture of engineering and the culture of formal learning environments often make it difficult for individuals to develop an engineering identity. Conversely, recent research points to the home environment as an alternative setting to support discipline-specific identity development of children, while less is known regarding the identity…

We study the distributional effects of remote learning using a novel approach that combines preference data from a conjoint survey experiment with administrative records of student outcomes. The experimentally derived preference data allow us to account for selection into remote learning while also studying selection patterns and treatment effect…

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…

In March of 2020 the COVID-19 Pandemic changed the world in education as we knew it. Schools, along with businesses and public venues around the world shut their doors in order to attempt to slow the spread of the virus. Just because the brick-and-mortar buildings were being closed did not mean that schooling would stop. Teachers and students from…

This research brief examines the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student achievement and progress toward academic 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 tracked the gap in…

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…