In this first edition of the “Research Insights” series, we visit the early childhood education space across NNERPP. Here we find three districts offering different versions of a kindergarten transition program for their students.

This technical report is written for measurement professionals and administrators to help evaluate the quality of the MAP Growth assessments.

This study investigated the violation of local independence assumptions within unidimensional item response theory (IRT) models.

In order to ask students to be vulnerable in talking about how they have been exposed to, and impacted by, society’s messages about race, gender, and sexual identity, we have a responsibility to first demonstrate that vulnerability ourselves. Thus, our work is more about “being” than “doing.” Modeling honest self-assessment allows us to ask students to be reflective about their relationship to power, privilege, and oppression.

This study uses an analytic example to explore whether metadata might help illuminate such constructs. Specifically, analyses examine whether the amount of time students spend on test items (after accounting for item difficulty and estimates of true achievement), and difficult items in particular, tell us anything about the student’s academic motivation and self‐efficacy.

In this study we conducted a literature review to investigate whether assessment metadata (typically data relevant to how students behave on a test or survey) can provide information on SEL constructs. Implications of this new source of SEL data for practice, policy, and research are discussed.

Megan Kuhfeld draws on data from the 3.4 million students who took the NWEA MAP Growth assessments to find that summer slide is common, but not inevitable. According to the data, the students who experienced the greatest loss were those who made the greatest gains during the previous school year.