This study explored the effects of pedagogical approaches on Title I kindergarten students' executive function (EF) and academic achievement to test the hypothesis that children, especially those from low socioeconomic backgrounds, will benefit when purposeful play is incorporated into learning. Students in the play-based group generally had…

The pandemic has led to considerable disruption to the learning of all pupils in England. This report analyses the general trends in the data across several studies investigating the impact of COVID-19 on educational attainment in England, from March 2020 onwards, and identifies where particular attention is needed. It is broken down into four…

Though researchers have demonstrated that adaptive practice software is an effective tool to use with primary grade students, they have not fully established the impact blended eLearning tools have on upper elementary students in a suburban school setting. The problem facing one southeastern state district was that their schools had selected…

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…

At a Title I School located in Central Georgia, 91% of the student population is performing below grade level. Lexia-Core 5 is a reading software program purchased by a Central Georgia school district to help students improve in reading. The purpose of this quantitative descriptive and causal-comparative study was to examine the impact of the…

Using a quantitative approach that draws on qualitative methods, this study aimed to identify what, if any, elements within an elementary teacher preparation program have a relationship between elementary student achievement gains in reading and math as well as a teacher's attrition. This study identified elements of teacher training programs…

The purpose of this longitudinal quantitative study was to determine the academic impact of the Leader in Me process on a public elementary school in Delaware as it relates to growth in reading and mathematics using the Measures of Academic Progress. This longitudinal case study focused on determining if a significant statistical difference…

Over the long summer break, students forget some of what they learned during the school year. This "summer learning loss" is especially large for low-income students. One policy aimed at decreasing summer learning loss is year-round education (YRE): re-distributing the usual number of school days so that students have more short breaks…

When the pandemic COVID -19 led to school closures, many of us had no idea that this disruption would last months and perhaps more than a year. Curriculum-based assessment (CBA) is an assessment process that uses academic knowledge picked directly from the material taught in the classroom. This form of criterion-referenced assessment connects…

This study provided an in depth look at the benefits to the explicit teaching of an effective reading strategy, text annotation. A quasi-experimental research design study evaluated the effectiveness of the use of text annotation on sixth-grade students' reading and social studies achievement and overall reading confidence. The participants in…

Using a national sample of kindergarten to eighth grade students from Catholic and public schools who took MAP Growth assessments, we examine achievement growth over time between sectors. Our findings suggest that while Catholic school students score higher in math and reading than public school students on average, they also enter each school…

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 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, "Student achievement in 2021-22: Cause for hope and continued urgency." The authors investigated two main research questions in this brief: (1) How do achievement gains…

In this paper we examine academic recovery in 12 mid- to large-sized school districts across 10 states during the 2021-22 school year. Our findings highlight the challenges that recovery efforts faced during the 2021-22 school year. Although, on average, math and reading test score gains during the school year reached the pace of pre-pandemic…

Analyses were conducted with second graders, drawn from an ongoing multi-cohort randomized controlled trial (RCT), who had been identified for RCT entry based on comorbid reading comprehension and word-problem solving difficulty. To estimate pandemic learning loss, we contrasted fall performance for 3 cohorts: fall of 2019 (pre-pandemic; n = 47),…