This study investigates the relationship between mastery goal performance and achievement on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test. With policies like the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) placing increased importance on standardized-state assessments, schools are making efforts to improve scores, often by focusing…

This quantitative, causal-comparative research study investigated whether school configuration has an impact on the reading performance of sixth-grade students by comparing the End-of-Grade (EOG) reading assessment Grade Level Proficiency (GLP) scores of sixth-grade students in K-8 configured schools to sixth-grade students enrolled in 6-8 grade…

This study examined the effect of small class size intervention on student outcomes using reading achievement scores as measured by the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS), a standardized, norm-referenced test, while controlling for independent variables inclusive of students' gender, race, socioeconomic status (SES), and environment. This…

The long-term impact of prekindergarten programs is an important consideration given the trend of dedicating more resources to these programs. However, long-term impact of prekindergarten programs is not well-understood and recent studies have shown preschool effectiveness can vary across states and programs. A state run prekindergarten program in…

Do grade configurations affect student academic performance? To bring new evidence to this question, I use recent district-by-grade data for nearly the entire United States that contain measures of test score achievement and rates of school switching induced by grade configuration. Past research has found that student performance, is, on average,…

This quantitative, correlational study aimed to investigate the relationships between collective teacher efficacy (CTE), its enabling conditions (EC-CTE), and student achievement in third through eighth grades in Colorado. Leveraging the theoretical foundations established by Rotter (1954), Bandura (1977) and expanded by Tschannen-Moran et al.…

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…

This paper presents results of a score interpretation study for a computer adaptive mathematics assessment. The study purpose was to test the efficacy of item developers' alignment of items to Range Achievement-Level Descriptors (RALDs; Egan et al.) against the empirical achievement-level alignment of items to investigate the use of RALDs as the…

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…

We use nearly 430 million standardized test scores, including test scores from more than 6,500 rural school districts, to describe educational opportunity in rural America. Although we find modest differences in outcomes between rural and nonrural students overall, these disparities are larger for specific socioeconomic, racial-ethnic, and…

We use nearly 430 million standardized test scores, including test scores from more than 6,500 rural school districts, to describe educational opportunity in rural America. Although we find modest differences in outcomes between rural and nonrural students overall, these disparities are larger for specific socioeconomic, racial-ethnic, and…

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…

There is empirical evidence of substantial heterogeneity in economic mobility across geographic areas and the efficacy of schools has been suggested as an explanatory factor. Using administrative microdata from seven states covering nearly 3 million students, we explore the potential role of schools in promoting economic mobility by estimating…

The purpose of this evaluation was to examine the impact of i-Ready Personalized Instruction that met Curriculum Associates' recommended usage levels on mathematics achievement, as measured by the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) mathematics assessment. This study compared mathematics achievement growth of students who used…