Karina Kling is a PhD student and Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Fellow in the Department of Psychology working with Susan Levine in the Cognitive Development Lab. Her research interests occupy the intersection between math, psychology, and education, specifically centered upon student learning processes and instructional strategies; with focused investigations that study the acquisition of specific mathematical concepts combined with contextualization of the learning environment, her research aims to inform practical, equitable, and effective education practices.

Yunzhen (Amy) Liang is a doctoral student in the Quantitative Methods program in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University.

Key Findings

• High school students earned more As (by 8-10 percentage points) during remote and hybrid learning than in pre-pandemic years.
• Most of the improvement was among students who had been earning Bs before the pandemic started.
• Failure rates were fairly comparable to pre-pandemic years.,
• More students in grades 4-8 failed classes than pre-pandemic (21 percent in 2021 vs.

Before the pandemic, Michelle Yarbrough says her son, Josiah, was a straight-A student at Charles H. Wacker Elementary School in the Washington Heights neighborhood. But once Chicago Public Schools went remote in spring 2020, she saw his grades begin to slip.

"I didn't think it would affect the progress report the way that it did," Yarbrough says. But when she saw that he had a D, she knew she had to do something. "He never had a D or F."

It’s 85 degrees on a recent morning on Chicago’s West Side. Gabriela Tenorio and her team of parent ambassadors gather on the corner of Madison and Central Park in the Garfield Park neighborhood with a mission: They’re looking for 3- and 4-year-olds to recruit for preschool.

The moms are doing street outreach on behalf of the parent advocacy group COFI, or Community Organizing and Family Issues. Armed with pamphlets and clipboards, they plan to knock on every door in sight to spread the word about universal preschool at Chicago Public Schools...

American students saw some of the biggest declines in academic achievement recorded in the last 50 years, according to a nationwide assessment that paints a stark picture of the pandemic’s effect on education.

The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is run by the U.S. Education Department, show that average scores for 9-year-old students fell five points in reading and seven points in math this year, compared to 2020. That marks the first-ever score decline in math and the largest decline in reading since 1990...

Your child’s art class involves a lot more than just the Crayola marker scribble-scrabble that will end up hanging on your refrigerator.

“Good arts education is not about the product,” says Jamie Kasper, director of the Arts Education Partnership and a former music teacher. “It is about the process of learning.”

Carlos is a doctoral student in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. His research interests broadly include social and racial inequality within urban education, pre-k-12 education reform, and the politics of the teaching profession. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, Carlos is investigating policies and practices that address educational inequality for students of color, immigrant, and Latinx students. Carlos served as an educator and administrator in Chicago and New York City schools and has extensive teaching experience.

Alex Gordon is a Research Assistant for the UChicago Consortium and a graduate student at the Harris School of Public Policy. In this position, he obtains, cleans, and analyzes data for projects on teacher retention and early college credit. His research interests include the substitute teacher shortage and the political economy of interactions between teachers’ unions and school parents. Before coming to UChicago, Alex taught fifth- through eighth-grade math at the St. Bartholomew School, where he still teaches an annual summer math intensive.

Amy Arneson is a Senior Research Associate at the UChicago Consortium, leading and supporting mixed-methods research projects with advanced quantitative analysis, visualization, and modeling. She focuses on conducting rigorous, meaningful, and timely research and, importantly, making the results accessible so that they can be used by educators to improve college and career outcomes for public school students. In particular, she examines equitable access to and outcomes of early college opportunities in high school and secondary and post-secondary career and technical education programming.