This guide was created as a resource to help families better understand "Measures of Academic Progress"® (MAP®), and their child's results. The guide provides answers to a variety of questions such as: "What is MAP?"; "What does MAP measure?"; "How do schools and teachers use MAP scores?"; "Can MAP tell…

Recently, researchers have begun to employ rigorous statistical methods and developmentally-informed theories to evaluate outcomes for students retained in non-kindergarten early elementary school. However, the majority of this research focuses on academic outcomes. Gaps remain regarding retention's effects on psychosocial outcomes important to…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether students retained in first grade, relative to similarly low-achieving students who were promoted, differed in the number of remedial educational services received by students in the pre-retention year and in the repeat year. Study participants were 769 relatively low-achieving first-grade…

During conferences to decide whether or not to retain a child, usually two questions are asked. The first is, "Will retention bring success in school?" The other is, "If we retain him, will he perform better in school than if we don't retain him?" The goal of this research was to see if retained students would make enough…

This study considered the efficacy of a differentiated approach to vocabulary instruction for learners with word-finding difficulties (WFD) in the speech and language pathologist's room. Using a pretest-posttest design to study treatment outcomes, 10 second graders with WFD received first semantic-based vocabulary instruction (S) and then…

In a pair of recent studies, Fryer and Levitt (2004a, 2004b) analyzed the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) to explore the characteristics of the Black-White test score gap in young children. They found that the gap grew markedly between kindergarten and the third grade and that they could predict the gap from…