In this webinar by the Alliance for Excellent Education, NWEA, and the National Center for Learning disabilities, learn about recent research on academic growth for students in special education before the pandemic and implications for policies and practices designed to spur COVID-19 recovery.

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.

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 study, we examine seasonal patterns of racial/ethnic achievement gaps in kindergarten through eighth grade using a national sample of over 2.5 million students.

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.