This report captures the perspectives of district, school, and teacher leaders (hereafter referred to as “local leaders”) to surface best practices for supporting student learning during COVID-19.

This study investigated teacher adaptation to the changes in teaching conditions caused by the transition to distance learning in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using data from the Applied Problems subtest of the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement administered to 1,364 children from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Childcare and Youth Development (SECCYD), this study measures children’s mastery of three numeric competencies (counting, concrete representational arithmetic and abstract arithmetic operations) at 54 months of age.

Researchers interviewed parents whose children participated in a three-week structured kindergarten transition program designed to promote parental involvement in school, reduce students’ chronic absenteeism, and increase children’s readiness for kindergarten. Interviewees expressed that participating in the program yielded benefits for themselves and their children, and proposed various ways that adjusting the program could better meet the needs of all stakeholders. Parent suggestions were synthesized into multiple implications for practice and substantiated by current relevant literature.

This study identifies students’ academic trajectories in the middle grades relative to a set of college readiness benchmarks. We apply math and reading college readiness benchmarks to rich longitudinal data for more than 360,000 students across the nation. Student-level and school-level demographic characteristics significantly predict academic trajectories.

In this Inside IES Research blog, RAND and NWEA researchers share some early findings from their work under an IES grant to develop strategies for schools and districts to address the impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on student assessment programs. In the blog, they describe some key findings from surveys and interviews on key concerns of districts and schools arising from the lack of assessment data from spring 2020.

This Bellwether Education Partners webinar examines how education research can continue to offer meaningful, relevant information to policymakers and practitioners after the “lost year” of data from COVID disruptions to schools and testing.