When recent NAEP results came out, the bleak headline was that American students are not getting better at reading comprehension. When the NAEP folks convened a panel of reading experts in early April, the primary grades got called out as one potential culprit. So what needs re-evaluating in K-3 literacy? One reasonable place to look is at oral reading fluency and the foundational skills that feed word decoding.

In this Ed Tech Digest article, Cindy Jiban discusses how oral reading fluency assessment is now commonplace in the primary grades. This represents a significant step for data-based problem solving in education. However, given some of the side effects that have emerged, it is clear that fluency assessment is due for significant structural improvement.

This study examines the impact of two “gameful assessment” prototypes on student engagement and teacher perceptions among 391 Grades 3–7 students and 14 teachers in one Midwestern and one Northwestern school.

Learning styles (LS) have been used for classifying students by their preferences relative to taking information in, processing it and demonstrating their ability in the context of education. This paper investigates the role of LS in K-12 education by considering the manner in which student LS are assessed and the extent to which they have informed K-12 instruction.

This study examined the relationships between poverty and a school’s academic performance (both student achievement and growth). Educators, advocates, and policymakers can use these data to shape how people look at the performance of schools in their communities and to inform education policy (e.g., the effect of evaluating schools based on achievement vs. growth).

This study examined developmental trends in academic achievement gaps between poverty and race/ethnicity groups from school entry to middle school using two large longitudinal data sets. We used time-varying effect modeling (TVEM) to estimate how the associations among race/ethnicity, poverty status, and math and reading achievement vary across continuous age from age 5 to age 15.

In this article, we examined the prevalence of rapid guessing to determine if this behavior varied by grade, subject, and teacher, and evaluated if rapid guessing influenced teacher value-added estimates. We observed differences in rapid guessing across grades, subjects, and teachers; however, this behavior did not appear to have a substantive effect on teacher value-added estimates.