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As the COVID-19 pandemic upended the 2019–2020 school year, education systems scrambled to meet the needs of students and families with little available data on how school closures may impact learning. In this study, we produced a series of projections of COVID-19-related learning loss based on (a) estimates from absenteeism literature and (b) analyses of summer learning patterns of 5 million students. Under our projections, returning students are expected to start fall 2020 with approximately 63 to 68% of the learning gains in reading and 37 to 50% of the learning gains in mathematics relative to a typical school year. However, we project that losing ground during the school closures was not universal, with the top third of students potentially making gains in reading.

This study examines associations between leisure reading and reading skills in data of 2,525 students followed from age 7 to 16. As a step further from traditional cross-lagged analysis, a random intercept cross-lagged panel model was used to identify within-person associations of leisure reading (books, magazines, newspapers, and digital reading), reading fluency, and reading comprehension. In Grades 1-3 poorer comprehension and fluency predicted less leisure reading. In later grades more frequent leisure reading, particularly of books, predicted better reading comprehension. Negative associations were found between digital reading and reading skills. The findings specify earlier findings of correlations between individuals by showing that reading comprehension improvement, in particular, is predicted by within-individual increases in book reading.

The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of the Common Knowledge Construction Model (CKCM) lesson sequence on grade 7 students’ conceptual understanding of the “water pollution” topic. Within a pre-experimental (one group pre-test/post-test) research design, this study was conducted with 25 (12 females and 13 males) grade 7 students in a lower secondary school in the district of Yenişehir, Bursa, Turkey. To collect data, word association test (WAT), conceptual understanding test (CUT), and interviews were employed. After calculating the students’ responses to the WAT and the CUT, their scores were imported into SPSS 15.0™ to run paired samples t test and descriptive analysis. Also, the interviewees’ responses to principal interview questions were thematically analyzed in regard to their similarities and differences. The results of the study showed that the CKCM lesson sequence resulted in a better conceptual understanding of the “water pollution” topic. The current study recommends to employ the CKCM lesson sequence for different science topics and varied grades and courses.

To determine whether formative writing assessments that are directly tied to everyday classroom teaching and learning enhance students’ writing performance, we conducted a meta-analysis of true and quasi-experiments conducted with students in grades 1 to 8. We found that feedback to students about writing from adults, peers, self, and computers statistically enhanced writing quality, yielding average weighted effect sizes of 0.87, 0.58, 0.62, and 0.38, respectively. We did not find, however, that teachers’ monitoring of students’ writing progress or implementation of the 6 + 1 Trait Writing model meaningfully enhanced students’ writing. The findings from this meta-analysis provide support for the use of formative writing assessments that provide feedback directly to students as part of everyday teaching and learning. We argue that such assessments should be used more frequently by teachers, and that they should play a stronger role in the Next-Generation Assessment Systems being developed by Smarter Balanced and PARCC.

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting stay-at-home orders created a need for assessing elementary, middle, and high school students' experienced stressors associated with the coronavirus situation. In collaboration with a school district wanting information about their students' well-being during the pandemic school shut-down, the current study investigated students' reported types and levels of COVID-19 stressors. Data were collected from 2,738 students from fourth through 12th grade in a suburban Midwestern school district in the United States following school closure related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data on stress associated with the COVID-19 pandemic were gathered from students via an online survey using Qualtrics. The students rated 20 items (e.g., not motivated to do schoolwork, not going to my school) on stress level. Stressor categories found included Social Isolation, Schoolwork Stress, Fear of COVID-19 Illness, and Missing Events. Middle and high school students reported higher schoolwork stress than did elementary students, and overall, females had higher reported stress on several stressors. The current study has implications for school psychologists including utilizing a tool to assess pandemic-related stressors, using prepandemic normative data in schools with caution, promoting education about COVID-19 to reduce fear, supporting teachers regarding addressing schoolwork stress experienced by students, and teaching students anxiety-reducing strategies such as mindfulness or coping strategies.

The development of divergent thinking (DT) in school-age children and adolescents has received considerable attention in the educational psychology literature since the 1970s. A body of research has outlined the existence of slumps (i.e., temporary declines) in this development with, however, conflicting findings concerning the magnitude and timing of these slumps. This study is the first to meta-analyze prior research findings regarding DT development from Grades 1 to 12, with a particular emphasis on the widely controversial fourth-grade slump. A total of 2139 standardized means from 41 studies involving 40,918 subjects were analyzed using a meta-analytic three-level model. The findings showed an overall upward developmental trend of DT across grade levels, with some discontinuities. Specifically, there was no evidence of a general fourth-grade slump; rather, evidences for a seventh-grade slump were found. Moderator analyses indicated that a fourth-grade slump might be observed depending on DT test, task content domain, intellectual giftedness, and country of study. The existence of the seventh-grade slump was also moderated by DT test, task content domain, and gender. Together, this study deciphers a longstanding debate regarding DT development, a prerequisite knowledge to support age-appropriate educational strategies that encourage creativity development. Implications of these findings for creativity research and practice are discussed.