NWEA Launches New National Dashboard to Track Student Achievement and Growth

Trend Snapshots report accompanies dashboard, highlighting new data from 2024-25 school year

PORTLAND, Ore., Oct. 14, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- NWEA, a K-12 assessment and research organization, announced today a new national dashboard that provides timely trends and data on U.S. student academic achievement and growth. This free public tool shows how K-8 students are performing in reading and math on the NWEA MAP Growth assessment, helping district leaders, educators, and policymakers interpret their own local results against a national group featured in the dashboard. Data in the dashboard will be updated three times a year immediately following testing sessions in the fall, winter, and spring.

Based on data from more than 7 million students in 20,000 schools (about one in four U.S. public K-8 schools), the dashboard highlights a large representative sample of students offering a comprehensive snapshot of national trends. It includes several sections that offer different perspectives and aspects of student achievement and growth. It also allows users to switch between specific grades, student groups, or states they want to explore. In addition, it includes a section on trends over time that shows how achievement has changed since the pandemic, with comparisons anchored to 2019 to support academic recovery analysis.

"One of the biggest lessons from navigating the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic is how essential reliable, timely student data are for driving strategic action about student learning," said Dr. Karyn Lewis, Vice President of Research and Policy Partnerships at NWEA. "Academic recovery has been slower and more uneven than expected, and research funding is increasingly constrained. Schools need evidence-based insights to make decisions through this complex landscape. That's why we built this dashboard: to provide updated national trends three times a year that help our partners understand where they are."

This new national dashboard builds on NWEA's long-standing commitment to delivering reliable, timely data. More than 20 years ago, NWEA launched the Growth Research Database, which gave education researchers and scholars access to academic growth data. That resource has supported critical research initiatives, offering analysis and answers that continue to inform education policy and practice.

With each seasonal update of the dashboard, NWEA researchers plan to provide a Trend Snapshots report that highlights a notable observation in the data and offers insights into what the latest data are telling us. Today's release highlights an overview of achievement and growth based on the 2024-25 school year.

Key findings include:

• Math achievement continues to show modest, incremental recovery, including among historically underserved groups. In most grades, there are signs that achievement gaps have been getting smaller since spring 2021. The gaps have shrunk the most in elementary grades.
• Reading achievement remains stalled with little rebounding to pre-COVID achievement levels. Patterns are consistent across student groups, showing stagnation is consistent regardless of race/ethnicity or school poverty level. Shortfalls in reading are now larger than or comparable to those in math in some grades.

"The past five years have been marked by disruption and slower than expected academic recovery," said Dr. Megan Kuhfeld, Director of Growth Modeling and Data Analytics, "Given the unevenness of recovery, even within schools and classrooms, national trends like these are an important first step to understanding where to dig deeper at the local level and ask critical questions about the necessary support and resources that are specific to the individual needs of each student."

Read the new Trend Snapshots report here: https://www.nwea.org/research/publication/trend-snapshots-math-recovery-continues-reading-remains-stalled-in-spring-2025/

View the new MAP Growth National Dashboard here: https://www.nwea.org/map-growth-national-dashboard

About NWEA

NWEA ^® (a division of HMH) is a mission-driven organization that supports students and educators in more than 146 countries through research, assessment solutions, and professional learning that support our diverse educational communities. Visit NWEA.org to learn more about how we're partnering with educators to help all kids learn.

Contact: Simona Beattie, Communications Director, [email protected] or 971.361.9526

SOURCE NWEA