NWEA
Projecting the potential impacts of COVID-19 school closures on academic achievement
With 55 million students in the United States out of school due to the COVID-19 pandemic, education systems are scrambling to meet the needs of schools and families, including planning how best to approach instruction in the fall given students may be farther… more →
The learning curve: Revisiting the assumption of linear growth across the school year
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… more →
Impacts of School Entry Age on Academic Growth through 2nd Grade: A Multi-State Regression Discontinuity Analysis
The belief that additional time allows children to become more ready for school has affected public policy and individual practices. Prior studies estimated either associations between school entry age and academic growth or causal effects on achievement measured at one or two points. This paper… more →
Estimating Student Growth on Psychological and Social-emotional Constructs: A Comparison of Multiple Scoring Approaches
A huge portion of what we know about how humans develop, learn, behave, and interact is based on survey data. Researchers use longitudinal growth modeling to understand the development of students on psychological and social-emotional learning constructs across elementary and middle school. In… more →
Do Response Styles Affect Estimates of Growth on Social-emotional Constructs? Evidence from Four Years of Longitudinal Survey Scores
Survey respondents use different response styles when they use the categories of the Likert scale differently despite having the same true score on the construct of interest. For example, respondents may be more likely to use the extremes of the response scale independent of their true… more →
Trends in Children’s Academic Skills at School Entry: 2010 to 2017
Students’ level of academic skills at school entry are a strong predictor of later academic success, and focusing on improving these skills during the preschool years has been a priority during the past ten years. Evidence from two prior nationally representative studies indicated that incoming… more →
Effect Sizes for Measuring Student and School Growth in Achievement: In Search of Practical Significance
Effect sizes in the Cohen’s d family are often used in education to compare estimates across studies, measures, and sample sizes. For example, effect sizes are used to compare gains in achievement students make over time, either in pre- and post-treatment studies or in the absence… more →