Search

The purposes of this study were to determine (1) the usefulness of ACT composite scores in assessing and predicting achievement and attrition of disadvantaged and regular freshmen at the University of Nebraska at Omaha during the 1972-73 academic year, and (2) the effectiveness of a special program in keeping low income students in school during their freshman year. Factors considered were: ACT scores, college grades, race, sex, socioeconomic status, financial aid, and employment. It was found that ACT scores were effective predictors of college grades among white students, but not among black students, regardless of income level. ACT scores were also effective predictors of attrition/persistence only among regular students in large samples, college grades being more potent for this purpose. The special program appeared more successful than the regular program in preventing attrition, especially among men and blacks; and receiving financial aid was better than not receiving financial aid. (Author/BW)

Each year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation, I explore the impact of school closures on students' educational and labor market outcomes. The findings indicate that experiencing school closures results in disruptions in both test scores and behavior. While the drop in test scores is recovered within three years, behavioral issues persist. This study further finds decreases in post-secondary education attainment, employment, and earnings at ages 25-27. These impacts are particularly pronounced among students in secondary education, Hispanic students, and those from originally low-performing schools and economically disadvantaged families.

This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of the Heggerty Bridge to Reading program for first-grade students compared to a business-as-usual reading program by employing a mixed-methods approach encompassing a matched quasi-experimental design, teacher surveys, and interviews. In light of the learning disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the study underscores the necessity of explicit reading instruction, with a focus on phonemic awareness and systematic phonics. Results indicate that the Bridge to Reading program, integrating phonemic awareness lessons with daily explicit phonics instruction, significantly improves student achievement on MAP Growth and MAP Fluency formative assessments, leading to higher RIT scores and growth compared to the control group. Analysis of student subgroups reveals significant progress among lower-achieving students, indicating effective support in bridging foundational reading skill gaps from kindergarten. Moreover, the program surpasses the comparison group in meeting projected growth targets, with a greater proportion of students reaching their mid-year growth target. Feedback from educators in the treatment group underscores positive perceptions, with teachers reporting enhanced understanding of reading methods and alignment with literacy development. The study also examines demographic factors and baseline scores, revealing significant impacts in areas such as phonological awareness, phonics, and word recognition. Additionally, the study outlines future steps, including qualitative data collection and end-of-year quantitative analysis, to further elucidate the program's efficacy. These preliminary findings suggest that the Bridge to Reading program holds promise in bolstering student achievement in foundational reading skills, particularly amidst the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. [This report was published with Heggerty.]

Who ends up in the teacher workforce is greatly influenced by who is admitted into teacher education programs (TEPs). To better understand how the preferences of teacher education faculty might shape admissions of STEM teacher candidates, we surveyed faculty who teach content or methods courses to STEM teacher candidates across five universities. Faculty reported that they most value information collected from individual interviews with applicants and data on the number of STEM courses taken in college and their performance in these courses, and least value data on university admissions tests, high school GPA, and teacher licensure test scores. When we investigate faculty members' revealed preferences through a conjoint analysis, we find that faculty most value applicants who have worked with students from diverse backgrounds and applicants from a marginalized racial or ethnic community, and least value whether they received high grades in math and/or science courses. Finally, we find significant variation in these perceptions across respondents in different faculty roles, who teach different courses, and from different institutions: for example, Arts and Sciences faculty tend to value TEP applicants' performance in college STEM courses relatively more than STEM education faculty, while STEM education faculty tend to value applicants' race and ethnicity relatively more than Arts and Sciences faculty.

In 2018, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) launched a strategic competitive grant program aimed at supporting Local Education Agencies (LEA) in achieving Math Innovation Zone (MIZ) designation. This initiative's primary focus is to increase PreK - 8th grade math proficiency levels through the implementation of a blended learning model in math classrooms. Blended learning is a data-driven pedagogical technique that integrates specialized adaptive software with traditional in-person teaching. This software enhances a teachers' capacity to promptly evaluate student comprehension of content in real-time during the learning process, which enables the teacher to deliver targeted interventions and extensions as necessary. Coupled with direct teacher instruction and peer collaboration, blended learning empowers students to engage in their own learning process by increasing student agency. This policy brief explores the relationship between MIZ implementation and student achievement, concentrating on the second implementation cohort. This cohort who began blended learning implementation in 2019, is particularly significant due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring of 2020. It highlights how the initiative adapted and influenced education during a challenging period. Examining the influence of the blended learning initiative, despite the crisis, provides valuable insight for educational stakeholders.

In October 2023, the California Department of Education released test scores for all students in Grades 3-8 and 11 for the 2022-23 school year. These results represent an opportunity to analyze whether and to what extent student learning has rebounded after the dramatic declines in scores resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures. Despite marginal improvements from 2021-22, student cohorts in 2022-23 remain very far behind prepandemic levels: in ELA, by 4.4 percentage points, and in math, by 5.1 percentage points. Most concerning is that these scores reveal so starkly the large and growing opportunity gaps between student groups.

The current study was a retrospective mixed-methods quasi-experimental design (QED) study to determine the effects of Progress Learning on Grades 6-8 mathematics and ELA achievement by comparison growth on the Georgia Milestones Mathematics and ELA assessments of students who received Progress Learning services, in relation to students that did not receive Progress Learning. Supplementary analyses examining the associations between Progress Learning usage metrics and achievement gains are also performed in this study. The results of the main impact analyses showed a positive and statistically significant impact of Progress Learning on student mathematics achievement, with treatment students outgaining comparison students by more than 4 points. The results of the main ELA impact analysis showed a directionally positive, though not statistically significant, impact on ELA achievement, with treatment students outgaining comparison students by more than 3 points. Effect sizes of these analyses ranged between 0.06 to 0.09 SDs, indicating small, though practically meaningful, program impacts of Progress Learning on student achievement, especially in mathematics. Usage analyses showed significant positive associations between student-level Progress Learning usage metrics and achievement gains. Correlations between average Progress Learning activity scores and achievement gains were of particular note, with observed correlations of magnitude above .4 in ELA and above .6 in mathematics. This gives preliminary evidence supporting modest to moderate predictive validity of Progress Learning activity scores in relation to Georgia Milestones scores. These associations remained significant and positive when controlling for prior achievement and demographics, using HLMs similar to those used in the main impact analyses.

Multilingual learners (MLs) are students whose primary language is not English and are eligible for English language development services through the Transitional Bilingual Instruction Program (TBIP). Eligible MLs receive TBIP services until they become proficient in English. During the 2022-23 school year, 149,357 students were identified as multilingual learners.

Florida State University researchers spent the last year collecting and analyzing data on corequisite developmental education (DE) models in Texas as part of a four-year study that received a $1.5M grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. This study was proposed in response to Texas House Bill (HB) 2223, which requires all public colleges to implement corequisite DE wherein academically underprepared students receive DE support while enrolling in college-level English and math courses in the same semester. The third year of the study investigated how student success in integrated reading and writing (IRW)/English and math vary by precollege academic preparation and how corequisite strategies, including approaches to testing, vary by institutional context. [This report was published by the Center for Postsecondary Success (CPS).]

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assesses the knowledge and skills in mathematics, reading and science of 15-year-old pupils in countries around the world. PISA is run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and assessment is typically undertaken every 3 years, allowing us to chart how performance changes over time and across different education systems. PISA 2022, which was undertaken 4 years after the previous cycle due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, involved 81 education systems, including England. In England, 4,763 15-year-old pupils from 165 schools completed a 2-hour computer-based assessment and pupil questionnaire. Headteachers at participating schools were also asked to complete a school questionnaire. The study was carried out in November and December 2022, with most of those pupils who participated completing their GCSE exams in 2023. This report analyses their performance in the three subject domains of mathematics, reading and science, as well as their responses to the pupil questionnaire, and their headteachers' responses to the school questionnaire. When reading this report, it is important to keep in mind that England's sample of participating pupils may not be entirely representative of all 15-year-old pupils in England. This is, to some degree, always the case with international studies such as PISA, but in this case the sample for England did not meet 2 of the 82 PISA Technical Standards. Analysis of the characteristics of the pupils who participated revealed that the final sample had somewhat higher academic attainment on average than the general population and a somewhat lower proportion of pupils who had been eligible for free school meals in the past 6 years. In other words, higher performing pupils may be overrepresented in the final sample and some of the PISA results may therefore be somewhat higher than they might otherwise be. This issue was also a challenge for some of the other participating education systems including several OECD countries. Given that the sample may not be entirely representative of the population, caution is required when interpreting the analysis that is presented in this report, though this does not necessarily translate directly to a particular score being a certain number of points higher than its 'true' value, and the OECD itself makes no adjustments to the scores in any education system in which some of the PISA's Technical Standards were not met. The term 'significant' is used throughout this report to refer to statistically significant differences between scores or values. In this report, we use a '95% confidence level' to define statistical significance. A statistically significant result is one that is not likely to occur by chance, due to the sampling process, and is more likely to be attributable to a genuine difference between groups. Similarly, the term average, as in 'average score', is used to refer to the arithmetic mean for the relevant group, unless stated otherwise.

Over the years, the nation's large urban school districts have consistently learned from the progress of their peer districts across the country. Great City School districts that have embraced the challenge of educating America's urban children have recognized the value of benchmarking their performance and growth against the progress of others. The authorization of the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project to develop and implement key performance indicators across the member school districts in operations, business services, finances, human resources, and technology was followed by the authorization of the Academic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to gauge performance. This 2023 report presents an updated set of data for school year 2021-22 and presents several different ways that member districts can analyze the data themselves by disaggregating results, showing trends, and combining variables. This report focuses on the data collection and analysis of the following Academic KPIs: (1) Pre-K enrollment relative to Kindergarten enrollment; (2) Algebra I completion rates for credit by grade 9; (3) Ninth grade course failure rates--at least one core course; (4) Ninth graders with B average (GPA) or better; (5) Absentee rates by grade level; (6) Suspension rates; (7) Instructional days missed per 100 students due to suspensions; (8) AP participation rates; (9) AP-equivalent participation rates; (10) AP exam pass rates; and (11) Four-year graduation rate.

In 2021, Mexico introduced "Pasaporte al Aprendizaje," a localized version of the Learning Passport digital learning platform, to mitigate learning loss after widespread school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Between October 2021 and February 2023, almost 100,000 students utilized it for upper-secondary courses. The research explores the key design and implementation steps undertaken for the successful deployment and use of the "Pasaporte al Aprendizaje." In addition, analysis of data from the digital learning platform shows that students assessment scores improved as they progressed through courses, in subjects such as mathematics, Spanish, chemistry and physics. The overall goal of this research is to inform improvements in the "Pasaporte al Aprendizaje" and provide key lessons learned for other countries implementing national digital learning programmes.

In response to widening achievement gaps and increased demand for post-secondary education, local and federal governments across the US have enacted policies that have boosted high school graduation rates without an equivalent rise in student achievement, suggesting a decline in academic standards. To the extent that academic standards can shape effort decisions, these trends can have important implications for human capital accumulation. This paper provides both theoretical and empirical evidence of the causal effect of academic standards on student effort and achievement. We develop a theoretical model of endogenous student effort that depends on grading policies, finding that designs that do not account for either the spread of student ability or the magnitude of leniency can increase achievement gaps. Empirically, under a research design that leverages variation from a statewide grading policy and school entry rules, we find that an increase in leniency mechanically increased student GPA without increasing student achievement. At the same time, this policy induced students to increase their school absences. We uncover stark heterogeneity of effects across student ability, with the gains in GPA driven entirely by high ability students and the reductions in attendance driven entirely by low ability students. These differences in responses compound across high school and ultimately widen long-term achievement gaps as measured by ACT scores.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that social and emotional skills (SE skills) can predict academic achievement, including grades and test scores, and prior research at ACT has shown that stronger SE skills are associated with higher ACT scores. However, despite the abundant evidence that SE skills are beneficial for students in general, less is known about the relationship between SE skills and academic achievement among students with disabilities, who make up approximately 15% of all public school students (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023). In this study, the relationship between SE skills and ACT scores among students with and without disabilities was examined. Using data from the Mosaic™ by ACT® Social and Emotional Learning assessment, two matched groups of 410 students each were created, one whose members had disabilities and one whose members did not. Findings show a positive relationship between SE skills and ACT Composite scores in both students with disabilities and students without disabilities.

This research brief summarizes the performance of Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS) students participating in the Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of Education (AICE) Program. Cambridge courses and examinations were offered at 18 MDCPS high schools in 2022-2023. For the 2022-2023 school year, Cambridge International returned to the non-adjusted, pre-pandemic grading standards for its exams. Over 16,700 examinations were completed by M-DCPS students in 35 subject areas in 2022-2023. The number of AICE exams completed in M-DCPS increased by 21% from 2021-2022 to 2022-2023. Overall, the percentage of AICE examinations receiving passing scores decreased by seven percentage points, from 73% in 2021-2022 to 66% in 2022-2023. From 2021-2022 to 2022-2023, the percentage of examinations receiving passing scores decreased for all groups of students, by 12 percentage points for White students, six percentage points for Hispanic students, nine percentage points for Black students, and by seven percentage points for students classified as "Other". At the conclusion of the 2022-2023 school year, 70% of eligible M-DCPS students received AICE diplomas, an eight percentage points decrease from 2021-2022.

The rising demand for dual-language immersion (DLI) programs, which offer core instruction in two languages from early grades onward, has raised questions about program design and access. We leverage the rapid expansion of DLI schools across the U.S. state of Utah to estimate effects of DLI program availability on the academic achievement of primary English speakers and English learners (ELs) in programs that serve mainly the former (one-way) or at least a third of the latter (two-way). Using within-school variation in first graders' access to DLI programs, we find no overall effects on English, math, or science scores from grades 3 to 6. However, ELs whose primary languages match the schools' partner languages in two-way schools show notable outperformance in math and higher English-language proficiency at grade 5. Benefits of DLI access are driven by schools with a larger share of primary speakers of the partner language. [This paper will be published in "The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy."]

Postsecondary readiness enables students to pursue their dreams, contribute to society, and thrive in the global economy. Since many accountability systems include a postsecondary readiness indicator in formal evaluations of schools and districts, it benefits educators, families, researchers, policymakers, and other education partners to understand how postsecondary readiness is defined, measured, and used. This brief, produced by the Region 15 Comprehensive Center, explains how states define and measure postsecondary readiness, an important step toward improving how such measures function within state accountability systems. Region 15 Comprehensive Center staff identified four main findings about the use of postsecondary readiness indicators, the types of measures included in the indicators, and how much weight indicators are given in accountability systems: (1) More than three of four ESSA plans contained a postsecondary readiness indicator; (2) States included three main types of measures in postsecondary readiness indicators: academic, career, and military; (3) Postsecondary readiness indicators focused most heavily on academic and career measures and less on military measures; and (4) Weighting of the postsecondary readiness indicator varies widely from state to state.

This research study sought to determine whether pre-reading assignments have an impact on a student's academic performance. Learning a new topic which oftentimes seems foreign is never easy. However, reading a short article or reviewing a slide-show presentation on the lecture topic before the lecture happens (otherwise known as a pre-reading assignment) can help alleviate the many burdens of learning new in-class concepts. The research participants consisted of thirty American undergraduate college students and were divided into either a control or experimental group based on the alphabetical order of their last name. Each participant took two of the same financial literacy tests which served as their pretreatment and posttreatment comprehension tests. An elementary level article on investing from Investopedia outlined the background information of the lecture on financial literacy. The article served as the pre-reading assignment and was administered solely to the experimental group. Both groups were asked to attend a series of small interactive lectures in order to measure the difference between their pre-lecture test scores and their post-lecture test scores. The findings were analyzed statistically through three Hedge's G Tests to identify means, standard deviations, and T values. It was found that the difference in test scores between the control and experimental groups were statistically significant at a 0.05 significance level as students in the experimental group outperformed the control group by roughly 9%. Implications include the potential integration of pre-reading assignments across universities in order to help improve academic performance.

This Research and Development study developed and validated a localized Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Competencies for Food and Beverage Services (FBS) level II trainees. Twenty-five (25) FBS NC II trainees from General Santos National School of Arts and Trades participated in the study; 72% were female, 28% were aged 21-25, and 72% were college graduates. Trainers, assessors, and industry experts evaluated the modules. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and weighted mean were employed to answer study issues and examine evaluator ratings. The competencies of preparing the dining area, promoting food and beverage, and providing room service are the least mastered. There is a significant difference in these competencies based on sex with t-3.017, p-0.012 and age with t-5.081, p-0.005, but not on educational achievement f-1.856, p-0.160. Required knowledge, skills, and (STEM) Competencies were identified based on the training regulation of the qualification. The correlation test showed p-values greater than 0.05, supporting the null hypothesis that mean gain scores on evaluating localize modules with STEM competencies in objectives, concepts, skills, usability, appropriateness, and adequacy are not significantly different. Thus, it is recommended that the localized module be tested in the training of FBS NC II and employed in the subsequent study.

Colleges and universities have become increasingly concerned that requiring standardized test scores for admission is an impediment to campus diversity, and these objections have grown with the recent focus on societal inequities. In addition, the pandemic led to the cancellation of test administrations, which, in turn, caused many institutions to eliminate admissions test requirements. These developments present an opportunity to reconsider the role of college admissions testing. The report begins by recounting the history of college admissions in the US, the relationship of admissions tests to intelligence testing and military testing, and the motivations for developing standardized exams to replace the admissions methods used at the turn of the twentieth century. Next, it describes the college admissions tests used today, along with their role in the admissions process, their advantages and limitations, and the ongoing debates about their fairness. Finally it discusses the future of admissions and admissions testing and end with a discussion of the concept of meritocracy as it applies to college admissions.

IXL is an end-to-end teaching and learning solution that engages learners in grades Pre-K through 12 with a comprehensive curriculum and a first-of-its-kind assessment suite. A core component of IXL's assessment suite is the IXL Diagnostic, an interim assessment designed by a team of educators and mathematicians that uses Item Response Theory (Lord, 1980) to automatically adjust question difficulty based on students' response patterns. The diagnostic can be used in two ways. In "Real-Time" mode, IXL's Diagnostic provides students and educators with in-the-moment information about students' subject area knowledge, which is extremely helpful for daily instruction. In "Snapshot" mode, the diagnostic serves as a flexible, lightweight benchmark assessment that is designed to be used one or more times during the school year to easily assess and track students' grade-level proficiency over time. After completing the diagnostic--either in Real-Time or Snapshot mode--students receive personalized action plans that help them close gaps quickly. The goal of the present study was to investigate the impact of completing IXL's Diagnostic Snapshot on student learning and achievement in grades 3 through 8. Using assessment data from four states (NY, TN, OK, and WI), we compared the math achievement of grade cohorts that completed at least one Snapshot during the 2021-22 school year to comparable grade cohorts that used IXL but did not complete a Snapshot during this time. Using 2021 assessment performance as pretest and 2022 assessment performance as posttest, we found that using IXL's Diagnostic Snapshot improves student math achievement. Grade cohorts that completed IXL's Diagnostic Snapshot performed better on their state math assessments than comparable IXL grade cohorts that did not complete IXL's Diagnostic Snapshot. Specifically, the proficiency rate was about three percentage points higher for Snapshot cohorts, relative to comparable IXL cohorts that did not complete the Snapshot.

We use administrative panel data from seven states covering nearly 3 million students to document and explore variation in "academic mobility," a term we use to describe the extent to which students' ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their public schooling careers. On average, we show that student ranks are highly persistent during elementary and secondary education--that is, academic mobility is limited in U.S. schools as a whole. Still, there is non-negligible variation in the degree of upward mobility across some student subgroups as well as individual school districts. On average, districts that exhibit the greatest upward academic mobility serve more socioeconomically advantaged populations and have higher value-added to student achievement.

The "Stabilizing Subgroup Proficiency Results to Improve the Identification of Low-Performing Schools" study used Bayesian stabilization to improve the reliability (long-term stability) of subgroup proficiency measures that the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) uses to identify schools for Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI) or Additional Targeted Support and Improvement (ATSI). The Every Student Succeeds Act requires states to designate schools with low-performing student subgroups for TSI or ATSI. This document presents the following appendixes that accompany the study: (1) Literature review; (2) Data and methods; and (3) Supplemental Results. [For the full report, see ED626539. For the Study Snapshot, see ED626540.]

The Every Student Succeeds Act requires states to identify schools with low-performing student subgroups for Targeted Support and Improvement or Additional Targeted Support and Improvement. Random differences between students' true abilities and their test scores, also called measurement error, reduce the statistical reliability of the performance measures used to identify schools for these categorizations. Measurement error introduces a risk that the identified schools are unlucky rather than truly low performing. Using data provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the study team used Bayesian hierarchical modeling to improve the reliability of subgroup proficiency measures and demonstrate the approach's efficacy. [For the Study Snapshot, see ED626540. For the appendixes, see ED626541.]

The RP Group's Multiple Measures Assessment Project (MMAP) produced this technical report as part of a series on how California's community colleges can ensure more English learners (ELs) successfully complete "gateway" English coursework -- courses that satisfy the English writing requirements for completion of an associate's degree as well as for transfer to a four-year college or university -- in a timely way. The report summarizes findings on how well information about international students' initial curricular pathway (English or ESL), level of placement in the pathway, and ESL placement test score(s) can predict their throughput in gateway English. It specifically focuses on the value of different commonly used ESL placement tests to this process, including the Combined English Language Skills Assessment (CESLA) and multiple types of ACCUPLACER tests. It begins with key findings from this research followed by a description of the research methodology. Then, it offers a detailed analysis of the predictive validity of different ESL placement tests for students' throughput. It concludes with high-level recommendations based on these findings. The report is intended to support the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office (CCCCO) and other educators and policymakers involved in development education reform in their decision-making about ways to continue supporting the success and completion of English learners in the system.

This paper examines the impact of Teach For America (TFA) on following-year student test and non-test outcomes in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. This paper measures the extent to which exposure to TFA is followed by improved student outcomes in the future. In particular, this paper measures days missed due to absences or suspensions, course grades in each core subject, and progression in math courses. We find that students taught by TFA math teachers go on to have higher grades in math courses in the following year and are less likely to miss school due to being absent or suspended. However, while students in TFA classrooms score higher on math and ELA assessments in a given year, these test score gains fade out by the following year.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the very youngest pupils in schools had their schooling and social interactions in the classroom disrupted by lengthy periods of school closures and remote learning. This research focuses particularly on these young pupils, and is exploring how their learning and social skills are recovering two years on from the pandemic. The data was first collected about the pupils when they were in Years 1 and 2, in the academic year 2020/21. This leaflet, for school leaders and teachers, follows the pupils into Years 2 and 3 in the academic year 2021/22. This summary for school leaders provides the headline findings from the study, "Impact of COVID-19-Related School Closures in Key Stage 1 on Attainment and Social Skills of Pupils in Year 2 and Year 3 in Academic Year 2021/2022. Report" [ED627825].