Important educational policy decisions, like whether to shorten or extend the school year, often assume that growth in achievement is linear through the school year.  This research examines this untested assumption using data from seven million students in kindergarten through 8th grade across the fall, winter, and spring of the 2016-17 school year.

In this study, we examine seasonal patterns of racial/ethnic achievement gaps in kindergarten through eighth grade using a national sample of over 2.5 million students.

This study provides a series of projections of COVID-19-related learning loss based on estimates from absenteeism literature and analyses of summer learning patterns of 5 million students.

This study examined the benefits of pre-K through the end of kindergarten for children from low-income homes in a large and diverse county, and factors associated with a reduction in benefits during the kindergarten year.

Data on children’s academic preparation at kindergarten entry tell a story of both declining achievement and shrinking gaps.

A huge portion of what we know about how humans develop, learn, behave, and interact is based on survey data. Although there is great deal of guidance on scaling and linking IRT-based large-scale educational assessment to facilitate the estimation of examinee growth, little of this expertise is brought to bear in the scaling of psychological and social-emotional constructs. Through a series of simulation and empirical studies, we produce scores in a single-cohort repeated measure design using sum scores as well as multiple IRT approaches and compare the recovery of growth estimates from longitudinal growth models using each set of scores.

This study investigated effort‐moderated (E‐M) scoring, in which item responses classified as rapid guesses are identified and excluded from scoring, and its affect on score distortion from disengaged test taking.