The ongoing literacy crisis in the U.S. highlights an urgent need for effective, scalable literacy instruction. REED Charitable Foundation (RCF) is a non-profit organization that provides structured literacy training informed by Orton-Gillingham, along with ongoing professional coaching and comprehensive implementation support to help all students…

This study explores the direction and magnitude of racial disparities on three advanced placement (AP) computer science (CS) exams, namely AP CS Principles, AP CS A, and AP CS AB, based on the test scores of more than one million students who have taken AP CS exams between 1997 and 2020. Using Mann-Kendall test and Sen's slope procedures we found…

ACT retesting occurs when students take the ACT® test multiple times with the goal of improving their scores and postsecondary credentials. In this paper, the author examines preliminary data for the 2022 ACT-tested graduating cohort to better understand the ACT score gains that occur with retesting. The author presents the following six things to…

School boards remain one of the most powerful forces in American education, helping to set curricula, evaluate teachers, and direct hundreds of billions of dollars in education funding. Yet teachers' unions play an outsized role in determining who serves on these boards. If the interests of teachers are perfectly aligned with those of students,…

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…

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…

Educational stakeholders have long known that students might not be fully engaged when taking an achievement test and that such disengagement could undermine the inferences drawn from observed scores. Thanks to the growing prevalence of computer-based tests and the new forms of metadata they produce, researchers have developed and validated…

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…

Important educational policy decisions, like whether to shorten or extend the school year, often require accurate estimates of how much students learn during the year. Yet, related research relies on a mostly untested assumption: that growth in achievement is linear throughout the entire school year. We examine this assumption using a dataset…

Two major reforms have transformed California's K-12 education system over the past decade. To revamp English and mathematics instruction, the Common Core standards were adopted in 2010, with district implementation beginning several years later. In 2013, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) was enacted to increase funding for disadvantaged…

The overall purpose of this study was to determine the impact of the School Improvement Grant on student achievement in a rural elementary school in Mississippi. In an attempt to decrease the achievement gap that existed among socioeconomically disadvantaged students and their more affluent peers, the United States Department of Education created…

Two major reforms have transformed California's K-12 education system over the past decade. To revamp English and mathematics instruction, the Common Core standards were adopted in 2010, with district implementation beginning several years later. In 2013, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) was enacted to increase funding for disadvantaged…

Utilizing the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, this study examined (1) how fourth and eighth-grade ELLs' mathematics and reading scores on national tests compared to their non-ELL peers' scores over the testing period between 2003 and 2011, and (2) if gender and ethnicity contributed to variation in the growth patterns…

This study reports on one school district's attempt to address reading gaps in boys, Aboriginal students, and special education students at 1st grade by implementing Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) to supplement classroom reading instruction. Findings indicate that compared to previous years, when PALS was not used, students in this study…