Equity
It remains a critical challenge to ensure all children—regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, and/or ability—have access to a high-quality education. We are at a pivotal time where communities and schools are navigating issues of equity, poverty, and opportunity gaps against a backdrop of shifting education policy. With access to exceptional data and a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and research partners, we are able to provide unique insight into these important issues.
The pandemic’s toll on academic growth wasn’t uniform. Recovery efforts can’t be either
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 .
Topics: Equity, COVID-19 & schools
The COVID-19 school year: Learning and recovery across 2020-2021
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.
Topics: Equity, COVID-19 & schools
This study compared the test taking disengagement of students taking a remotely administered an adaptive interim assessment in spring 2020 with their disengagement on the assessment administered in-school during fall 2019.
Topics: Equity, Innovations in reporting & assessment, School & test engagement
This study evaluates the effects of asking items throughout the passage (i.e., embedding items) to achieve a more precise measure of reading comprehension by removing barriers for students to demonstrate their understanding. Results showed a significant impact of embedding comprehension items within reading passages on the measurement of student achievement in comparison to answering items at the end of the passage.
Topics: Equity, Innovations in reporting & assessment, Reading & language arts
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.
This study examines the text quality of math assessment items for students with VI who use screen readers. Using data from about 29.5 million students taking standard versions of the MAP Growth math assessment, and 48,845 students taking accessible versions, we identified high-quality items, those that measured achievement for both students with and without VI equally well, and low-quality items, which showed differences between the two groups of students.
Topics: Accessibility, Equity, Math & STEM
Looking beyond vision: Supports for students who are blind or visually impaired in mathematics
This review examines research on math achievement in students who are blind or visually impaired, the opportunities that BVIs have to demonstrate their knowledge of mathematics, as well unique challenges they face and ways in which these barriers have (or have not) been addressed.
Topics: Accessibility, Equity, Math & STEM
