Since March 2020, the National Literacy Trust (NLT) has explored the various benefits of audiobooks for children and young people, from building comprehension skills to sharing stories across generations. Time and again, two key themes have arisen: the power of audio to engage reluctant readers, and the role of audiobooks in promoting and…

Students' level of academic skills at school entry are a strong predictor of later academic success, and focusing on improving these skills during the preschool years has been a priority during the past 10 years. Evidence from two prior nationally representative studies indicated that incoming kindergarteners' math and literacy skills were higher…

This report outlines findings from our ninth Annual Literacy Survey relating to children and young people's reading. 56,906 children and young people aged nine to 18 in the UK participated in our survey between January to March 2019. For the first time we also had information from 3,748 children aged 5 to 8 who completed a similar survey designed…

This paper presents a vulnerability framework as a means to contextualize inequities in reading achievement among children who are vulnerable to poor reading outcomes. Models to understand vulnerability have been applied in the social sciences and public health to identify population disparities and design interventions to improve outcomes.…

This paper presents a vulnerability framework as a means to contextualize inequities in reading achievement among children who are vulnerable to poor reading outcomes. Models to understand vulnerability have been applied in the social sciences and public health to identify population disparities and design interventions to improve outcomes.…

Students' level of academic skills at school entry are a strong predictor of later academic success, and focusing on improving these skills during the preschool years has been a priority during the past ten years. Evidence from two prior nationally representative studies indicated that incoming kindergarteners' math and literacy skills were higher…

We apply "value-added" models to estimate the effects of teachers on an outcome they cannot plausibly affect: student height. When fitting the relatively simple models that are widely used in educational practice to New York City data, we find the standard deviation of teacher effects on height is nearly as large as that for math and…

The 35th edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's "KIDS COUNT"® Data Book examines the unprecedented declines in student math and reading proficiency brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on education. The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveals that between 2019 and 2022, fourth-grade reading…

Estimates of teacher "value-added" suggest teachers vary substantially in their ability to promote student learning. Prompted by this finding, many states and school districts have adopted value-added measures as indicators of teacher job performance. In this paper, we conduct a new test of the validity of value-added models. Using…

To what extent are multigenerational forces associated with the becoming of measured academic skills? This study argues that by considering inhuman(e) ontologies such as a system of racialized structural relations, a new materialist and radical black feminist lens opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing and understanding how shifting…

Using data from the children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, spanning 1986 to 2014, we investigated whether White, Black, and Hispanic children whose parents had the same wealth, measured as net worth, have equal math and reading achievement trajectories from age five through fourteen. Black and Hispanic children often…

We have conducted the national annual literacy survey since 2010 and have surveyed young people on literacy issues since 2005. This report outlines findings about children's and young people's reading from our seventh annual literacy survey conducted in November/ December 2016 and where possible relates those findings back to our other reading…

Spanish-speaking students constitute the largest subgroup of emergent bilingual (EB) students in the United States. Using longitudinal data on a nationally representative sample of Spanish-English EBs, we explore profiles of English reading trajectories and how early individual differences (i.e., early Spanish reading and English oral proficiency)…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether components of the Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive (PASS) processing theory of intelligence predict reading and mathematics proficiency in a group of intellectually gifted children. One hundred forty-two intellectually gifted children (70 females, 72 males; M[subscript…

Background: There is increasing recognition of the contribution of affective factors such as motivation to the development of reading competence. Reading activity is theorised to mediate associations between motivation and achievement, but this has been tested empirically only rarely. Method: This study employed structural equation modelling to…