Learning to read by the end of third grade is a pathway to a successful life (Keesler, 2019). Research by the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows that students who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school and are ineligible for a majority of jobs in the United States (Hernandez,…

The problem addressed through this study was that Grades 2-4 teachers in a New England urban elementary school district are challenged to remediate student learning loss in reading achievement. In the district, there was documented low reading proficiency for Grades 2-4 over the past 5 years, including before, during, and after the COVID-19…

This study explored the impact of the 95 Phonics Core Program® (95 PCP) on student literacy achievement across third graders who started the school year at different ability levels. The primary focus of this report was to investigate the relationship between changes in phonics scores with the beginning and end-of-year i-Ready® assessments and…

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…

The study investigates the impact of Roadmap-formatted curriculum on student reading growth in grades 3-5 in the Ypsilanti Community Schools (Ypsilanti, MI). Classrooms in grades 3-5 were divided into two groups: those using the Roadmap-formatted, commercially-provided curriculum and those using the same commercially-provided curriculum in…

We examined how children (N = 448) with separate or co-occurring developmental language disorder (DLD) and dyslexia performed on school-based measures of academic functioning between second and fourth grades. Children were recruited from 1 school district in the U.S. state of South Carolina via classroom screenings and met common research criteria…

The purpose of this quantitative within-groups comparative study was to determine if there was a significant difference between the 2019 (pre-COVID-19) and the 2021 (post-COVID-19) third grade Standards of Learning (SOL) reading and math scores in urban Title I elementary schools in a southeastern state. The conceptual framework for this study was…

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 current study aimed to explore the COVID-19 impact on reading achievement growth by Grade 3-5 students in a large urban school district in the U.S. and whether the impact differed by students' demographic characteristics and instructional modality. Specifically, using administrative data from the school district, we investigated to what extent…

Instructional coaching has been implemented in schools to improve student achievement; however, literature shows a lack of evidence of the efficacy of improving student reading achievement. The problem addressed in this study was that school districts have implemented instructional coaching to improve student reading achievement, but the…

In Mozambique, the COVID-19 pandemic led to schools closing for 80 percent of the 2020 academic year, affecting 8.5 million students and nearly 15,000 schools across the country (United Nations, 2020). This brief seeks to address two crucial questions regarding Mozambique's Grade 3 and 4 students. First, what is the current state of reading…

This report is a continuation of work that examined the progress being made by districts to close the achievement gap in Kentucky (Butler and Poquette, 2019) and aims to further investigate the context in which districts are closing the achievement gap. Districts' achievement gap issues vary significantly: the size of districts' achievement gaps…

The current study aimed to explore the COVID-19 impact on the reading achievement growth of Grade 3-5 students in a large urban school district in the U.S. and whether the impact differed by students' demographic characteristics and instructional modality. Specifically, using administrative data from the school district, we investigated to what…

Despite repeated findings that within-year growth in oral reading rate is nonlinear for many students, existing decision-making frameworks to evaluate response to intervention assume that growth is linear across an entire school year. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the consequences of failing to account for nonlinear growth among…

The COVID-19 pandemic produced widespread disruption to schooling, impacting 90% of the world's students and moving entire school systems to remote and online learning. In the state of New South Wales, Australia, most students engaged in learning from home for at least eight weeks, with subsequent individual and intermittent school closures.…