Early grades represent a critical time in students’ development of foundational skills for academic success and beyond. While state learning assessments typically do not begin until third grade, data on student outcomes during early grades are limited. This study, authored by Hiroyuki Yamada, explored trends in mathematics outcomes for a national sample of students who entered first grade in fall 2021. These students participated in Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready Diagnostic for Mathematics, a web-based adaptive interim assessment tool designed to measure four domains of mathematical skills. The sample included 309,230 students from 6,348 schools in Grade 1 (2021-2022 school year) and 6,350 schools in Grade 2 (2022-2023 school year). The following is the E4 team’s summary of this report and its implications.
Key Finding 1: Learning growth is greatest in the first half of students’ first-grade year, and this initial growth appears to slow as the school year progresses.
- With this knowledge, teachers may wish to explore changes to their instructional methods to meet students’ evolving physiological, psychological, and social needs in early elementary grades.
- When assessing student growth at specific time points, educators, stakeholders, and policymakers interpreting data on learning outcomes may want to keep in mind that student progress is not linear.
- Additional research is needed to understand why student learning growth is greater at the beginning of the school year, especially for those students entering first grade.
Key Finding 2: Disparities in student growth persist across school years. For example, a student who places at the kindergarten level when entering first grade will likely place at the first-grade level when entering second grade.
- Greater access to student learning data in early grades may improve schools’ ability to pinpoint target groups for learning interventions and inform schools’ decisions about how to allocate resources. These data may also be used to assess the effectiveness of these interventions or the impact of additional resources.
- Educators, stakeholders, and policymakers who wish to address disparities in learning growth may consider increasing supports before students enter first grade. By addressing developmental needs and fostering foundational skills early on, these early supports would improve the likelihood that all students have a solid educational footing as they transition to higher grades.
- For early grades, assessments of Algebraic thinking focus on skills relevant to seeing number patterns, understanding the meaning of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and using symbols to write and solve equations. These skills align with those in the Common Core State Standards domain of Operations and Algebraic Thinking. Prior work from E4 examined learning outcomes across math domains for grades 1-5.
- As elementary teachers navigate the myriad of available student data sources, they may find that attending to student performance in this learning domain is particularly helpful. Through the design and implementation of fine-tuned interventions for students at different levels, educators can leverage assessment results and recommended skill development activities from online learning systems. Students who face challenges in any mathematics domain may benefit from an intervention targeted at improving their skills in the foundational domains of Algebra and Algebraic Thinking.
Key Finding 3: Assessments of Algebra and Algebraic Thinking skills are the greatest predictors of student growth.