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Elementary schools
Evaluation Scores and Student Learning under Compulsory Teacher Re-Evaluation
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentWe examine how lower-performing public school teachers respond to more frequent formative evaluations. A 2011 reform in Chile required teachers rated "basic" (the second-lowest category) to be re-evaluated after two years rather than four. Using nationwide administrative data on primary school… more →
Shine a Light: The U.S. Federal Government Should Increase Access to Educational Administrative Data
Topics: MethodsThe Institute of Educational Sciences invested substantial resources into the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems grant program. These grants helped states convert their educational records to longitudinal datasets for research and evaluation. However, external researchers still have unreliable… more →
Post-pandemic achievement recovery based on student characteristics and district-level policies
Topics: Student LearningIt is well-established that student achievement has declined dramatically since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, less is known how these patterns may vary by developmental timing of exposure to the pandemic and how district-level policies may have influenced student recovery.
Helping the Many by Tutoring the Few: The Social Multiplier of Early Literacy Instruction
Topics: Student LearningTutoring is almost always evaluated by randomizing students within schools, a design that differences out any spillover onto classmates. We instead randomize 81 Danish schools and 2,583 kindergartners, tutoring a few children in each and testing all. Decoding improved 0.38 standard deviations… more →
Bidirectional associations between executive function and social behavior across childhood: A registered report using a nationally representative sample
Topics: Student Well-BeingExecutive function (EF) refers to a set of cognitive skills involved in deliberate, goal-oriented behavior. Although research has established links between children’s EF and aspects of their social skills, it remains unclear how EF skills are related to specific social behaviors, such as… more →
Teacher-student relationships and adult outcomes: Developmental cascades via childhood executive function and behavioral dysregulation
Longitudinal data were examined to test associations between teacher-student relationships and adult outcomes, as well as mechanisms underlying these associations. Results from the NICHD-SECCYD (N=1364; 52% male; 76% White; 13% Black; 6% Hispanic; 5% other; data collection took place in the U.S… more →
Not Too Young to Notice: The Early Emergence of Racial Disparities in Elementary Students’ School Climate Perceptions
Topics: Student Well-BeingScholarship on school climate often fails to explore the perspectives of elementary-school students. To fill this gap, we use survey-data from Georgia to examine racial disparities in elementary-school students’ school climate perceptions, how they vary over time, and the factors that associate… more →
Using experimental variation to examine the (co-)development of cognitive and social-emotional skills in early childhood
Topics: MethodsTags: Child development, Early childhood education, Elementary schools, Returns to education and skillsHow cognitive and social-emotional skills emerges in childhood is a central question in developmental psychology. Despite a proliferation of theory and empirical work, the field has struggled to establish causal effects. We employed a novel approach to test the stability and codevelopment of… more →
Does Fadeout Preclude Long-Run Adult Effects? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Educational Intervention Randomized Controlled Trials
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: Early childhood education, Elementary schools, High schools, Human capital, Returns to education and skillsA perplexing pattern has been observed in the intervention literature: although impacts on children’s skills often fade, some interventions still produce long-run impacts on adult outcomes. Existing developmental theory does not provide a straightforward explanation. This “fadeoutemergence… more →
Beyond the Classroom: Impact of a High-Dosage Tutoring Program on Student Literacy Achievement
Topics: Student LearningThis study examines the impact of a high-dosage tutoring program, characterized by low tutor-to-student-ratio, on the literacy achievement of students in grades two through five in a midsized suburban school district in the southeastern United States. Using a student-level randomized controlled… more →
COVID-19-Induced School Closures and Disadvantaged Children’s Post-COVID Academic Growth: A Longitudinal Cohort Study
Topics: Student LearningThis study draws on unique, repeated-measures data on a diverse (51% female; 53% Latine, 22% Black, 11% White), low-income cohort of children (N = 680) whose academic skills were assessed before and after COVID-19-induced school closures. Longitudinal models predicted changes in children’s… more →
Creating Classes: Elementary school classroom assignments and their implications for student access to high-quality teaching
We investigate the distribution of students across classrooms in North Carolina elementary schools. While tracking is ubiquitous and well-documented in secondary education, limited evidence exists regarding cross-classroom clustering in elementary schools and its consequences. Consistent with… more →
Influence of Within-Class Age Differences on Adolescents’ Eating Behaviors
Topics: Student Well-BeingThis study examines within-class age differences as a novel determinant of adolescents’ dietary behaviors, isolating it from confounders such as absolute age, season of birth, and country-specific school entry rules. Using a multi-country dataset of over 600,000 European students, we find that… more →
What is the impact of changing schools on the academic outcomes of elementary and middle school students?
Topics: Student LearningWe study how different kinds of school changes shape achievement in grades 4–8 using data from six California districts (2016–17 through 2019–20). We estimate the effects of structural (promotional), nonstructural summer, and midyear moves and find that structural and summer moves have near-zero… more →
Gender Gaps in the Early Grades: Questioning the Narrative that Schools are Poorly Suited to Young Boys
Topics: Student LearningA growing number of scholars and educational leaders have raised concerns that the mismatch between an increasingly academic focus in the early grades and boys’ maturity at school entry is disadvantaging young boys in school. In this study, we use a unique dataset of ten million students to… more →
Measuring Elementary School Teachers' Knowledge of Teaching Vocabulary
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentTeacher Knowledge in the field of literacy has become a priority across the United States, with many states passing legislation requiring that all teachers receive adequate training on the Science of Reading. One essential component of literacy development and text comprehension is vocabulary… more →
Does Civic Education Impact Primary-School Students’ Civic Outcomes? Experimental Evidence from Liberia
Topics: Student LearningWe present experimental evidence on a civic education program in Liberia's public primary schools across 140 schools serving grades 3 and 4. The program provided new civic textbooks, teacher training, bi-weekly instruction, and regular classroom monitoring. After one school year, treatment… more →
The Extent of Student Mobility Among Vulnerable Groups in California
Nonstructural student mobility—school changes not tied to grade-level promotion—is common and consequential yet remains underexamined in recent research. This paper analyzes the incidence, disparities, and predictors of nonstructural school mobility using longitudinal data from six… more →
Teaching Practices and the Persistence of School-Entry Age Effects
Topics: Student LearningWe consider the effect of teaching practices on the persistence of school-entry age effects caused by rigid cutoff dates for school eligibility in Spain. We document significant school-entry age effects for the same cohort of students when they were in elementary and secondary school. Then, we… more →
Separation of Church and State Curricula? Public Standards, Private Values, and Textbook Content
Tags: Belonging, Culturally responsive schooling, Curriculum, Elementary schools, Equity, Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education, Human capital, Instructional design, Instructional practices, Instructional technology, LGBTQIA+ students, Parenting, Race, ethnicity, and education, Reading and literacy education, School reform, Science education, Social studies educationCurricula are a critical site of cultural transmission, yet we know little about the values conveyed in textbooks across educational settings or the forces that shape them. We examine textbooks from Texas and California public schools and religious-private and home schools spanning 1980-2022,… more →