This study presents a framework that uses academic trajectories in the middle grades for identifying students in need of intervention and providing targeted support.

English Learners (ELs) lag behind their peers in postsecondary attainment. New research reports findings from the first three years of an intervention that offers Early College opportunities in high schools serving large EL populations.

While COVID-19 learning interruptions are unprecedented in modern times, existing research on the impacts of missing school (due to absenteeism, regular summer breaks, and school closures) on learning can inform projections of potential learning loss due to the pandemic. In this study, we produce a series of projections of COVID-19-related learning loss and its potential effect on test scores in the 2020-21 school year based on estimates from prior literature and analyses of typical summer learning patterns of five million students.

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 conducted empirical and simulation analyses in which we scored surveys using item response theory (IRT) models that do and do not account for response styles, and then used those different scores in growth models and compared results.

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 paper contributes novel causal evidence for the impacts of kindergarten entry age on academic growth in the first three years of school.