To describe the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students, researchers have translated test scores into months of learning to claim how many months/years students are behind in school. Despite its perceived accessibility, there are major downsides to this translation. To inform future uses by researchers and media, we discuss in this brief how to calculate this metric as well as its trade-offs.

In this blog, Elizabeth Barker shares the motivation and key insights from her study with Angela Johnson exploring academic achievement and growth for students in special education during summers and school years.

New research using data from over 2,300 rural schools across the US provides unique insight into math and reading achievement of students in rural schools so educators and policymakers can better understand and support the potential needs of rural schools.

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.

Students with disabilities lose even more ground than peers during summer and other interruptions in their learning—but they don’t need to. Data point to a need for services that extend beyond the school year.

Using achievement data from fall and spring of grades K-8 for 840,000 students in 8,800 public schools, this study provides novel evidence on how achievement and growth differ between rural and nonrural schools. Rural students start kindergarten slightly ahead of nonrural students but fall behind by middle school. The divergence is driven by larger summer losses for rural students. In both rural and nonrural schools, Black–White achievement gaps widen during the school year.