The purpose of this technical appendix is to share more detailed results and describe the sample and methods used in the research included in Student achievement in 2021-22: Cause for hope and continued urgency.

This study uses test scores from 5.4 million U.S. students in Grades 3–8 to track changes in math and reading achievement across the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this Education Week blog, AIR and NWEA researchers share insights from their collaborative research on academic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and what their work suggests about how much academic recovery students need .

This study uses test scores from 4.9 million U.S. students in Grades 3 through 8 to examine the academic disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic by modeling student achievement trends prior to and during the pandemic, with particular focus on growth in 2020-2021.

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

School officials regularly use school-aggregate test scores to monitor school performance and make policy decisions. In this report, RAND researchers investigate one specific issue that may contaminate utilization of COVID-19–era school-aggregate scores and result in faulty comparisons with historical and other proximal aggregate scores: changes in school composition over time. To investigate this issue, they examine data from NWEA’s MAP Growth assessments, interim assessments used by states and districts during the 2020–2021 school year.

The COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with political and social unrest, has deeply disrupted the lives and learning experiences of most students. It has created an urgent need to address long-standing opportunity gaps and has highlighted the importance of providing resources that support student achievement, social-emotional learning, and physical and mental well-being. This urgency for action to address the impacts is valid, but it has also created a noisy environment of potential options of what might be best for students. It’s critical, now more than ever, for decisions to be grounded in solid research.