Research on Education Strategies to
Advance Recovery and Turnaround
Policymaker
Social emotional learning (SEL) is a vital component of learning environments that foster well-being and success for both students and educators. Students have experienced profound learning and mental health challenges since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) invested in Learning Renewal–SEL programs to address these challenges. The American Institutes for Research (AIR®) is collaborating with ISBE to evaluate its Learning Renewal–SEL initiative, which is described in Exhibit 1.
National test scores show the deleterious effects of the pandemic on student learning. In this blog, we explore the urban-rural divide in learning loss and recovery. Urban districts lost more ground in math, while rural districts lost more in reading. As districts recover, Latino students and economically disadvantaged students in rural areas are further left behind.
In education, nearly all the action in policy and program design happens at the state and local levels. And, compared to local-level studies, state-level studies are attractive because they offer large samples of students, teachers, and schools and opportunities to look at a policy or program across different types of students and schools. However, many “statewide” policies are actually implemented by the school district, and school districts make adjustments for their own context.
Join the RESTART Network, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), for the Actionable Insights from Research and Practice to Support Pandemic Recovery Forum, an in-person convening at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) headquarters in Arlington, VA.
During the 2024 National Network Forum, researchers, policymakers, leaders, and practitioners will join to discuss accelerating student learning, fostering student connectedness and social emotional learning, and emerging research related to pandemic recovery.