This report captures the perspectives of district, school, and teacher leaders (hereafter referred to as “local leaders”) to surface best practices for supporting student learning during COVID-19.

Four-day school weeks have proliferated across the United States, but little is known about their implementation or their effects on students. This study uses district-level data from Oklahoma  to provide estimates of the causal effect of the 4-day school week on high school students’ ACT scores, attendance, and disciplinary incidents during school.

This study investigated teacher adaptation to the changes in teaching conditions caused by the transition to distance learning in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researchers interviewed parents whose children participated in a three-week structured kindergarten transition program designed to promote parental involvement in school, reduce students’ chronic absenteeism, and increase children’s readiness for kindergarten. Interviewees expressed that participating in the program yielded benefits for themselves and their children, and proposed various ways that adjusting the program could better meet the needs of all stakeholders. Parent suggestions were synthesized into multiple implications for practice and substantiated by current relevant literature.

In this Inside IES Research blog, RAND and NWEA researchers share some early findings from their work under an IES grant to develop strategies for schools and districts to address the impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on student assessment programs. In the blog, they describe some key findings from surveys and interviews on key concerns of districts and schools arising from the lack of assessment data from spring 2020.

This Bellwether Education Partners webinar examines how education research can continue to offer meaningful, relevant information to policymakers and practitioners after the “lost year” of data from COVID disruptions to schools and testing.

This book focuses on practical uses of assessment in education and provides resources and strategies for teachers, administrators, and other educational leaders who strive toward data-informed instruction that balances the use of assessment to address opportunity gaps.