Background: Young children clearly know quite a bit about the conventions of written language; for instance, 5-year-old children are sensitive to the fact that words tend to include both consonants and vowels, rather than just one or the other. The core theoretical debate lies in whether this understanding of sub-lexical orthographic regularities…

This study explores the efficacy of core phonics and intervention products by 95 Percent Group, LLC ("One95"), drawing on the relationship between technology, the science of reading, and learning sciences. Researchers analyzed data from 440 K-1 students in Maryland that rolled out One95 over two school years, fall 2020 to spring 2022.…

Summer numeracy interventions have become standard educational practice across a range of jurisdictions, but there is a paucity of evaluations of those interventions across international settings. We employ a quasi-experimental evaluation of voluntary summer numeracy programs for 569 attendees and 2,193 comparison students in grades 1-3, conducted…

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the sudden cancellation of in-class instruction for many students around the world presented an unprecedented disruption in children's education. As the COVID-19 pandemic took form, multiple concerns were raised about the potential negative impact on students' learning. The current study…

The study was carried out to determine whether Turkish primary school 1st graders experienced reading loss during the summer holidays and whether giving book support to disadvantaged students during the summer holidays was effective in preventing this loss. The research was conducted with 26 students at a rural primary school. The pretest-posttest…

This study reports achievement and growth from kindergarten to 4th grade for three groups of English Learners (ELs): (a) ever-ELs; (b) ELs consistently eligible for service; and (c) EL and Special Education dually-identified students. All three EL groups had lower test scores than never-ELs throughout K-4. In math, ELs grew more than never-ELs…

State legislators recognized that students in the United States continue to struggle with reading and have begun implementing laws requiring schools to use science of reading-aligned curriculum when teaching reading (Schwartz, 2022). Many students lack the foundational skills to even begin learning how to read in grades K-3 (Kuhfeld et al., 2022).…

Michigan's Great Start Readiness Program (GSRP) is a state-funded pre-K program that serves at risk four-year-old children across the state. Utilizing longitudinal data from 1,394 children in a mid-sized urban school district, we conducted regression analyses and piecewise linear growth models to examine the growth trajectory of GSRP children and…

Problem Statement: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, students were negatively impacted academically and social-emotionally (Kuhfeld et al., 2020). Preexisting academic inequities were exacerbated, especially for students of color, students with disabilities, multilingual learners, and those from low-income backgrounds (Kuhfeld et al., 2022).…

Nearly 30 years ago, Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin (1990) introduced the "fourth-grade slump" to describe the unexpected deceleration of reading skills between first and fourth grades among children growing up in poverty and low-income households. Advances in our understanding of reading development and how race, racism, or other forms of…

Nearly 30 years ago, Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin introduced the fourth-grade slump to describe the unexpected deceleration of reading skills between first and fourth grades among children growing up in poverty and low-income households. Advances in our understanding of reading development and how race, racism, or other forms of discrimination are…

This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of the Heggerty Bridge to Reading program for first-grade students compared to a business-as-usual reading program by employing a mixed-methods approach encompassing a matched quasi-experimental design, teacher surveys, and interviews. In light of the learning disruptions caused by the COVID-19…

This cohort-sequential study explored the working memory (WM) structures that underlie growth in mathematical word problem solving (WPS) performance in elementary school emergent bilingual children whose first language (L1) is Spanish. To this end, children (N = 429) in Grades 1, 2, and 3 in southwest U.S. school districts at Wave 1 were…

While the ongoing academic impacts of the COVID pandemic in grades 3-8 has been well documented, far less is known about its effects on students who were in pre-K or kindergarten when the pandemic started in March 2020. In this brief, we focus on students who were in first and second grade in the 2021-22 school year, and for whom the majority of…

This study examined the literacy trajectories of 185 Head Start-eligible Black children from preschool to first grade enrolled in a high-quality early learning program physically connected to an elementary school where they attended kindergarten and first grade. Social emotional, language, and literacy skills were assessed in the fall and spring…