

The pandemic’s toll on academic growth wasn’t uniform. Recovery efforts can’t be either
In this Education Week blog, AIR and NWEA researchers share insights from their collaborative research on academic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and what their work suggests about how much academic recovery students need .
By: Andrew McEachin, Emily Morton, Dan Goldhaber
Topics: COVID-19 & schools, Equity


Four-day school weeks have proliferated across the United States, but little is known about their implementation or their effects on students. This study uses district-level data from Oklahoma to provide estimates of the causal effect of the 4-day school week on high school students’ ACT scores, attendance, and disciplinary incidents during school.
By: Emily Morton


The COVID-19 school year: Learning and recovery across 2020-2021
This study uses test scores from 4.9 million U.S. students in Grades 3 through 8 to examine the academic disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic by modeling student achievement trends prior to and during the pandemic, with particular focus on growth in 2020-2021.
By: Megan Kuhfeld, James Soland, Karyn Lewis, Erik Ruzek, Angela Johnson
Topics: COVID-19 & schools, Equity


This study compared the test taking disengagement of students taking a remotely administered an adaptive interim assessment in spring 2020 with their disengagement on the assessment administered in-school during fall 2019.
By: Steven Wise, Megan Kuhfeld, John Cronin
Topics: Equity, Innovations in reporting & assessment, School & test engagement


This study evaluates the effects of asking items throughout the passage (i.e., embedding items) to achieve a more precise measure of reading comprehension by removing barriers for students to demonstrate their understanding. Results showed a significant impact of embedding comprehension items within reading passages on the measurement of student achievement in comparison to answering items at the end of the passage.
By: Meg Guerreiro, Elizabeth Barker, Janice Johnson
Topics: Equity, Innovations in reporting & assessment, Reading & language arts


In this blog, Elizabeth Barker shares the motivation and key insights from her study with Angela Johnson exploring academic achievement and growth for students in special education during summers and school years.
By: Elizabeth Barker


The instructional legacy of COVID-19: Teacher adaptation in response to the pandemic
This study investigated teacher adaptation to the changes in teaching conditions caused by the transition to distance learning in the COVID-19 pandemic.
By: Helena Connolly, Naina Abowd, Catherine C. Chase
Topics: COVID-19 & schools, Empowering educators