This study reports achievement and growth from kindergarten to 4th grade for three groups of English Learners. The findings suggest summer support is required to help ELs maintain and develop academic skills.

This study reports achievement and growth from kindergarten to 4th grade for three groups of English Learners. The findings suggest summer support is required to help ELs maintain and develop academic skills.

This study examined the stability of social-emotional learning (SEL) skills and the extent to which students’ initial level in SEL skills in 6th grade and growth in SEL skills from 6th to 8th grade are related to students’ successful transition to secondary school. Findings suggest that understanding how a student develops social-emotionally can improve identification of students not on track to succeed in high school.

To avoid the subjectivity of having a single person evaluate a construct of interest, multiple raters are often used. While a range of models to address measurement issues that arise when using multiple raters have been presented, few are available to estimate growth in the presence of multiple raters. This study provides a model that removes all but the shared perceptions of raters at a given timepoint then adds on a latent growth curve model across timepoints. Results indicate that the model shows promise for use by researchers who want to estimate growth based on longitudinal multi-rater data.

This study reports achievement levels and fall-to-spring gains in grades K to 8 for three groups of English Learners (ELs):  ever-ELs who were ever eligible for service; current-ELs who continue to require service; and dually-identified students eligible for both EL and Special Education services.

A huge portion of what we know about how humans develop, learn, behave, and interact is based on survey data. Although there is great deal of guidance on scaling and linking IRT-based large-scale educational assessment to facilitate the estimation of examinee growth, little of this expertise is brought to bear in the scaling of psychological and social-emotional constructs. Through a series of simulation and empirical studies, we produce scores in a single-cohort repeated measure design using sum scores as well as multiple IRT approaches and compare the recovery of growth estimates from longitudinal growth models using each set of scores.