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…

The state of Arkansas adopted ACT 1063 in 2017, which was designed to improve reading achievement for all students. Included in the law was the requirement that "curriculum programs that are supported by the science of reading and based on the instruction that is explicit, systematic, cumulative, and diagnostic be implemented (Division of…

Background/Context: Future Forward (FF) is an early elementary literacy program, administered by Education Analytics (EA), that combines one-on-one tutoring with parent engagement to promote student literacy development both at school and at home. In 2011 FF was funded by an i3 grant to develop the program and test its impact in Milwaukee. Two…

YouthTruth is a national survey project that harnesses student and stakeholder feedback to help guide decision-making by school leaders and education funders. With a grant from the Fund for Shared Insight, YouthTruth partnered with SRI Education to examine the relationship between key student experience scales and school-level academic and…

This memo from James F. Lane Senior Advisor, Office of the Secretary, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, announces the supplemental grant awards under the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and provides recommendations for how to support evidence-based practices intended to increase attendance and engagement of students in the middle…

COVID-19 significantly impacted the educational and home environments for students throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia in ways that may have impacted student learning, as measured by standardized exams. We analyze statewide, student-level administrative and assessment data on the Standards of Learning (SOL) reading and math tests for the…

This study examined how students' motivational regulation affects their academic performance based on the self-determination theory (SDT). The research involved data analysis from over 7,056 sixth-grade students in 446 South Korean elementary schools. We applied a stepwise multi-level modeling (MLM) approach to assess the influence of five…

This Data Appendix provides the data behind the Fact Sheet, "California's K-12 Test Scores."

In alignment with the Academic Excellence pillar of the Strategic Plan, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) is committed to improving student achievement in literacy. MCPS initially piloted a Structured Literacy approach in Kindergarten-Grade 2 during the 2021-2022 school year. Due to the pilot's success in improving student outcomes, MCPS…

Background: In addition to phonological processing and vocabulary, morphological awareness has been clearly identified as contributing to learning to read. While the impact of socio-economic status (SES) has been identified for both phonological processing and vocabulary, less is known about the SES influence on morphological awareness and its…

Background: Expectancy-value theory posits that higher levels of utility-value yield better achievement outcomes. Much of the existing research on utility value has focused on the individual as the unit of analysis. Person-culture fit theory, however, suggests that it is also important to consider the fit between the person and the broader society…

The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 requires the use of evidence in adopting programs, particularly for children with reading disabilities. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to evaluate the effects of a literacy intervention called Helping Early Readers Obtain Excellence in Special Education (HEROES), developed for children ages six to…

A mixed-design study investigated how teachers and second/third- and fourth-grade bilingual students in three high-poverty schools responded to dialogic cognitive strategy instruction or dialogic responsive engagement (RE) instruction compared with a treated control (vocabulary). The second graders were taught in Spanish, and the fourth graders…

The authors conducted a small-scale randomized control trial (n = 31 teachers) of Online Content-Focused Coaching, an intervention consisting of an online workshop followed by multiple cycles of remote video-based coaching, to support dialogic text discussions. Findings demonstrate the efficacy of Online Content-Focused Coaching in three different…

This article reports the effect of short films as an advance organizer on the development of students' reading skills. The current study aimed to investigate how short films affect the comprehension and reading self-efficacy perception of students from different socioeconomic levels. The participants included 204 fifth grade students from three…