Waiting to Learn? An Exploratory Examination of Achievement Growth (and Achievement Gaps) by Initial Proficiency

• In Event: Who Gets to Learn? Student Achievement and Academic Growth

Abstract

By the end of elementary school, there are striking achievement differences among students and among schools. Longitudinal analyses of academic growth in reading and mathematics provide an opportunity to examine differential growth and may aid efforts to eliminate achievement gaps among students. Prior research has also suggested that students who enter kindergarten with high levels of reading and mathematics proficiency may exhibit slower achievement growth. In this paper, we explore the development of children’s reading and mathematical skills from kindergarten through fifth grade, using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort 2011 data. How does beginning proficiency in reading and mathematics predict students’ reading and mathematical growth trajectories from kindergarten through fifth grade? Do students with higher levels of reading and mathematical proficiency in kindergarten make more or less growth than students of lower initial proficiency? How does race/ethnicity moderate these effects?
ECLS-K:2011 data come from a cohort of students who entered kindergarten in Fall 2010 and followed the same students from kindergarten through the fifth grade. For the present study we used ECLS-K 2011 data from the fall and the spring of kindergarten (2010-11), the fall and spring of first grade (2011-12), the fall and spring of second grade (2012-13), the spring of third grade (2014), the spring of fourth grade (2015), and the spring of fifth grade (2016).
Analysis: Using the ECLS-K 2011 data, we fit a series of latent growth models to describe students’ mathematics and reading growth from the fall of kindergarten through the spring of fifth grade. First, we modeled the functional form of the data. Initial graphical and analyses of the data revealed two different types of non-linearity: 1) non-linearity due to school year vs. summer differences in growth, and 2) non-linearity due to non-constant growth across the six-year time span. Our models account for differential growth during the academic periods (i.e. fall to spring) as compared to the non-academic periods (i.e.- spring to fall) using piecewise linear (reading) and piecewise quadratic (mathematics) latent growth curve models. Our models also include proficiency level and underrepresented status, and the interaction of proficiency level and underserved status to our growth curve models.
Results: Traditionally underrepresented students were indeed underrepresented in the highest two proficiency groups in mathematics and reading. However, underserved students in the top two proficiency levels grew similarly to their non-underserved peers in the top proficiency groups in both mathematics and reading. By the end of fifth grade, these students maintained their top standing. In contrast, across both reading and mathematics, for students with initial proficiency below the 95th percentile, the achievement gap widened between underserved and reference students from kindergarten through fifth grades. This was especially pronounced in mathematics. In the full paper, we discuss these analyses and results more fully, explore school and district characteristics that relate to the growth of initially high achieving students in reading and mathematics, and compare our results to similar growth models using the original ECLS-K data.

Authors

• D. Betsy Mccoach, University of Connecticut

• Scott Joseph Peters, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater

• Jennifer Richardson, University of Connecticut