The growth in the availability of longitudinal data--data collected over time on the same individuals--as part of program evaluations has opened up exciting possibilities for evaluators to ask more nuanced questions about how individuals' outcomes change over time. However, in order to leverage longitudinal data to glean these important insights,…

The writing performance of many school-aged children is consistently below levels necessary to produce positive outcomes. Early intervention frameworks are designed to help remedy this problem before it becomes more severe, but a key feature of early intervention frameworks--the use of data for targeting interventions--has not been sufficiently…

There has been a significant increase in the use of secondary data sets. Many such data sets purport to be nationally representative. Secondary data sets include research commissioned by the National Center for Education Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control, and other public entities. Research increasingly utilizes these secondary data in…

Literacy data collected over the course of 2 academic years were used to estimate the rate at which full- and half-day kindergartners acquired literacy skills during kindergarten, 1st grade, and the intervening summer. Application of piecewise growth models to the time series data obtained on a sample of students from a large Southwestern school…