One part of COVID-19's staggering impact on education has been to suspend or fundamentally alter ongoing education research projects. This article addresses how to analyze the simple but fundamental example of a multi-cohort study in which student assessment data for the final cohort are missing because schools were closed, learning was virtual, and/or assessments were canceled or inconsistently collected due to COVID-19. We argue that current best-practice recommendations for addressing missing data may fall short in such studies because the assumptions that underpin these recommendations are violated. We then provide a new, simple decision-making framework for empirical researchers facing this situation and provide two empirical examples of how to apply this framework drawn from early childhood studies, one a cluster randomized trial and the other a descriptive longitudinal study. Based on this framework and the assumptions required to address missing data, we advise against the standard recommendation of adjusting for missing outcomes (e.g., via imputation or weighting). Instead, we generally recommend changing the target quantity by restricting to fully observed cohorts or by pivoting to focusing on an alternative outcome.

Consistent school attendance is a critical component of education. Although research suggests that high rates of absenteeism is a significant issue for many students, minimal evidence exists focusing on absences among the nation's youngest students those in pre-kindergarten. This study focused on students in a large, urban district and examined the prevalence of pre-kindergarten chronic absence for different student subgroups, its relationship to learning outcomes during pre-kindergarten, and its association with ongoing attendance patterns and learning outcomes through second grade. Results indicated that absence in pre-kindergarten was widespread, particularly among African American students and those who entered pre-kindergarten with the lowest skills. Chronically absent pre-kindergarten students those who were absent 10% or more of their enrolled days displayed lower levels of academic and behavioral kindergarten readiness and were more likely to be chronically absent in subsequent grades. By third grade, students chronically absent for multiple years exhibited the need for significant intervention to read at grade level. These findings suggest that providing supports to improve attendance in pre-kindergarten and early elementary years has the potential to reduce achievement gaps and redirect struggling students onto the pathway toward educational success. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Research Findings: The Early Education Essentials surveys use teacher and parent perceptions to measure 6 organizational conditions of early childhood education programs, extending and complementing existing measures of early childhood care and education (ECE) quality constructs. This study tests the reliability and concurrent validity of the Early Education Essentials in 81 school- and community-based ECE sites in a large Midwestern city selected using a stratified random sampling method. Using a Rasch item response theory model, scales were created; theory and exploratory factor analyses combined scales into higher level constructs called essentials. Multilevel models took into account individual measurement error to create site-level essential scores and assessed relationships between programs' essential scores and site-level teacher-child interactions scores and student attendance. Findings suggest that the Early Education Essentials is reliable in multiple ECE settings; it is sensitive to site-level differences; and some, but not all, organizational conditions measured are associated in expected directions with site-level metrics indicative of center-based ECE quality. Practice or Policy: The Early Education Essentials has the potential to provide leaders and practitioners with actionable data about organizational supports that enable ECE practitioners to be more effective in their daily work with children and families.

Missing school is damaging the growth and development of our nation's students, particularly those entering school with the lowest skills (Ehrlich, Gwynne, Pareja, & Allensworth, 2014). It has been...

Accumulating evidence indicates that student attendance is closely tied to a range of educational outcomes, and yet millions of students are chronically absent each year. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), schools are now held accountable for their students' attendance at a scale this country has never before seen. As such, this is a crucial time to understand what research and evaluations suggest about what schools can do to move the needle on student attendance. As researchers work toward understanding the impact of different interventions and practices, and how results vary by grade level, on-the-ground experiences in schools highlight the pervasive use of incentives from pre-K to grade 12. Schools have employed a wide range of incentives to improve attendance, with varied levels of success. Unfortunately, there is little guidance on what policymakers and practitioners ought to consider when deciding if incentives are an appropriate intervention, and then how to design incentives in ways that align with the nature of specific attendance barriers and problems. This article presents a framework to fill that gap. We outline the design considerations when creating attendance incentives and offer guidance to practitioners deciding what to implement in their school.

The existence of a sex difference in spatial thinking, notably on tasks involving mental rotation, has been a topic of considerable research and debate. We review this literature, with a particular focus on the development of this sex difference, and consider four key questions: (1) When does the sex difference emerge developmentally and does the magnitude of this difference change across development? (2) What are the biological and environmental factors that contribute to sex differences in spatial skill and how might they interact? (3) How malleable are spatial skills, and is the sex difference reduced as a result of training? and (4) Does 'spatializing' the curriculum raise the level of spatial thinking in all students and hold promise for increasing and diversifying the STEM pipeline? Throughout the review, we consider promising avenues for future research.

A summary of the report's key points

University of Chicago researchers describe the ingredients that children need for adult success.

The new report, by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, synthesizes knowledge from the fields of youth development, psychology, sociology, education and the cognitive sciences. Drawing on decades of theory and research as well as insights from those who work with young people, it describes what children need to grow and learn, and how adults can foster their development in ways that lead to college and career success, healthy relationships and engaged citizenship. It also identifies the obstacles that children in poverty and children of color may face in achieving their potential and suggests how policy and practice can help overcome those challenges. These three factors rest on four “foundational components,” qualities that adults can directly influence:

Since the initial research on the On-Track metric, UChicago Consortium researchers have studied the transition to high school again and again to develop a large body of work on the critical nature of freshman year in Chicago Public Schools. This annotated bibliography provides an overview of the most important UChicago Consortium research over the past decade as well as how the findings push practice on the ground. Ongoing Research from the UChicago Consortium TOOL SET

Abstract— This article argues that executive function (EF) capacity plays a critical role in preschoolers’ ability to test and revise hypotheses and, furthermore, that young children can engage in the process of testing hypotheses before they are able to revise or confirm them. Research supports the view that this ability depends on their EF capacity to represent, and reflect on, hierarchical rules relating actions to predicted or observed outcomes (i.e., differences between what they predicted and what they observed). The article concludes by discussing the ramifications of this perspective for early science education.