Technical brief
Technical appendix for: Learning during COVID-19: An update on student achievement and growth at the start of the 2021-22 school year
December 2021
Description
The purpose of this technical appendix is to share more detailed results and to describe more fully the sample and methods used in the research included in the brief, Learning during COVID-19: An update on student achievement and growth at the start of the 2021-22 school year. We investigated two research questions:
- How does student achievement in fall 2021 compare to pre-pandemic levels (namely fall 2019)?
- How did academic gains between fall 2019 and fall 2021 compare to normative growth expectations?
Topics: COVID-19 & schools, Equity, Growth modeling
Associated Research
Related Topics
A level playing field: College readiness standards
This study examines the academic growth of 35,000 elementary and middle school students in 31 states—all of them high achievers within their own schools—over a three-year period.
Topics: Equity, College & career readiness
Do high flyers maintain their altitude? Performance trends of top students
In this study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, achievement trends from NWEA’s longitudinal growth database were used to track students who scored at or above the 90th percentile on this assessment in order to see if they maintained their high achievement.
Topics: Equity, High-growth schools & practices
The current investigative study uses a multiple-indicator, latent-growth modelling (MLGM) approach to examine the longitudinal achievement construct and its invariance for MAP Growth.
Topics: Measurement & scaling, Growth modeling
Modeling student growth has been a federal policy requirement under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In addition to tracking student growth, the latest Race To The Top (RTTP) federal education policy stipulates the evaluation of teacher effectiveness from the perspective of added value that teachers contribute to student learning and growth. Student growth modeling and teacher value-added modeling are complex.
Topics: Growth modeling, Measurement & scaling, Student growth & accountability policies
Modeling student test-taking motivation in the context of an adaptive achievement test
This study examined the utility of response time-based analyses in understanding the behavior of unmotivated test takers. For an adaptive achievement test, patterns of observed rapid-guessing behavior and item response accuracy were compared to the behavior expected under several types of models that have been proposed to represent unmotivated test taking behavior.
Topics: Measurement & scaling, Growth modeling, School & test engagement
A longitudinal study of reading growth for students with visual impairments
This study compares reading growth for students with visual impairments with a nationally normed group of students from the general population using data from the NWEA MAP Growth assessment.
Topics: Equity, Accessibility, Reading & language arts
The development of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gaps during the school years
This study examined developmental trends in academic achievement gaps between poverty and race/ethnicity groups from school entry to middle school using two large longitudinal data sets. We used time-varying effect modeling (TVEM) to estimate how the associations among race/ethnicity, poverty status, and math and reading achievement vary across continuous age from age 5 to age 15.
Topics: Equity, Growth modeling
