New research examining academic achievement and growth of students in special education and their peers who were never in special education during each school year and summer in grades K-4 shows that students with disabilities grow as much or more academically during the school year than their peers without disabilities some years, but that steeper summer learning loss for students with disabilities contributes to widening disparities.

This study compares within- and across-years academic growth for students who were ever in special education (ever-SPED) to students who were never in special education (never-SPED) in grades K-4. Ever-SPED students grew more in math and reading than never-SPED students during many school years, but lost more learning during every summer than their peers, leading to expanding disparities. These findings suggest that summer learning opportunities are crucial for improving educational outcomes for students with disabilities.

To avoid the subjectivity of having a single person evaluate a construct of interest (e.g., a student’s self-efficacy in school), multiple raters are often used. This study provides a model for estimating growth in the presence of multiple raters.

Among the many ways in which schools are being transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the change in kindergarten enrollment is likely to have important consequences in classrooms across the nation. Because the academic and nonacademic skills students develop in their preschool and early elementary school years are foundational to important longer-term outcomes, understanding these changes and finding ways to effectively support our youngest students’ learning is critical for educators and leaders. Drawing on recent research, we offer four timely considerations for district, school, and classroom leaders.

Important educational policy decisions, like whether to shorten or extend the school year, often assume that growth in achievement is linear through the school year.  This research examines this untested assumption using data from seven million students in kindergarten through 8th grade across the fall, winter, and spring of the 2016-17 school year.

In this AERA video brief, Megan Kuhfeld shares major findings and implications of preliminary projections of the potential impact of COVID-19-related school closures in spring 2020 on student learning, published this month in Educational Researcher.

This study provides a series of projections of COVID-19-related learning loss based on estimates from absenteeism literature and analyses of summer learning patterns of 5 million students.