Various forms of networks in education have been proposed by scholars, policymakers, and educational administrators as a strategy for school improvement. However, there are few empirical studies on the effect of interschool networks. We analyzed data from 76 elementary schools in a Midwestern state to examine the association between interschool…

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted schools to transition to remote instruction during the latter half of the 2019-20 school year and continuing into the 2020-21 school year. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data trends indicate that there were statistically significant declines in students' mathematics and reading scores between 2020…

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…

Learning to read by the end of third grade is a pathway to a successful life (Keesler, 2019). Research by the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows that students who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school and are ineligible for a majority of jobs in the United States (Hernandez,…

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…

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.…

This study examined the effect of a supplemental, multicomponent reading intervention with 75 seventh graders who scored below grade level according to a battery of assessments. Students received a yearlong reading intervention during the 2021-2022 or 2022-2023 school year. Students' pretest and posttest data were compared to determine the impact…

This report focuses on a 2023-2024 implementation of "My Reading Academy" at Epic Charter Schools in Oklahoma. "My Reading Academy" was first used with a small pilot group of students and educators at the charter school network in school year 2022-2023, and based on the initial positive results, the implementation of the…

To make up for pandemic-related learning losses, many U.S. public school districts have increased enrollment in their summer school programs. We assess summer school as a strategy for COVID-19 learning recovery by tracking the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts serving 400,000 students. Based on…

This study explored the impact of the 95 Phonics Core Program® (95 PCP) on student literacy achievement across third graders who started the school year at different ability levels. The primary focus of this report was to investigate the relationship between changes in phonics scores with the beginning and end-of-year i-Ready® assessments and…

This brief is a continuation of NWEA's research series examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student achievement and progress toward academic recovery. Initiated in the early phase of the pandemic, this series has leveraged NWEA's large national sample of longitudinal MAP® Growth™ data to track student performance and compare it to…

Within the last 100 years, the number of school districts in America has dropped by as much as 90% (Murdock, 2012), from 117,108 in 1939 to 13,452 in 2019 (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2020). Funding and how to provide educational equity, equality, and justice for all is a critical conversation. According to the North Dakota…

The purpose of this article is to review recent literature on summer learning loss (SLL) and consider the implications for post-pandemic learning loss. Fifteen articles, published between 2010 and 2022, were reviewed and selected according to a systematic protocol from two widely used online databases. The analysis shows that SLL has been widely…

By the end of 2021, more than 168 million students across the globe had missed a year of face-to-face schooling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In NSW, Australia, most students engaged in learning from home for eight weeks during 2020 and a further 14 weeks during 2021. This study provides robust empirical evidence on how two years of disruptions to…

This paper presents evidence of the effects of dual language immersion (DLI) programs on the academic outcomes of students in elementary grades. Leveraging enrollment lotteries from four cohorts of DLI applicants across 10 oversubscribed programs, analyses estimate the intent-to-treat effect of access to bilingual education on reading and math…