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…

The problem addressed through this study was that Grades 2-4 teachers in a New England urban elementary school district are challenged to remediate student learning loss in reading achievement. In the district, there was documented low reading proficiency for Grades 2-4 over the past 5 years, including before, during, and after the COVID-19…

Running two separate two-stage randomized trials, we implement and test three variants of a small group instruction intervention aimed at improving mathematics competencies for the 20% lowest achievers in mathematics in grades 2 and 8 in Danish public schools. We calculate immediate impacts on math competencies as well as impacts in the medium…

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…

In mathematics, there are four basic operations that students must master from the elementary school level, namely addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. However, some students experience difficulties or misunderstandings in interpreting multiplication as repeated addition. This research aims to improve the learning outcomes of…

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…

We examined how children (N = 448) with separate or co-occurring developmental language disorder (DLD) and dyslexia performed on school-based measures of academic functioning between second and fourth grades. Children were recruited from 1 school district in the U.S. state of South Carolina via classroom screenings and met common research criteria…

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…

South Carolina's public education system is broken. For the past several years, the State of South Carolina and the nation have somehow managed to do the nearly impossible. Both have produced more English Language Learning (ELL) students to be proficient in English Language Arts (ELA) (i.e., reading, writing, and usage) than native English…

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 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 effects of rich vocabulary instruction (RVI) on reading comprehension in a second-grade classroom by comparing the RVI model with the non-rich vocabulary instruction (NRVI) model. The effects of RVI and NRVI on reading comprehension were analyzed by examining for a significant association between the RVI model or NRVI model…