An Intensive Longitudinal Study of the Development of Student Achievement over Two Years (LUISE)

Abstract

Educational researchers have long been interested in quantifying the amount of change in student achievement as a result of schooling. In this paper, we present an intensive longitudinal study of student achievement and cognitive ability over a time span of two academic years, from the beginning of ninth grade until the end of tenth. One hundred and twelve students participated in the intensive longitudinal study, which consisted of 44 testing sessions. A control group of 113 students participated only in the pretest and posttest. We provide descriptive results for the trajectories of German language and mathematics achievement in different domains and report comparisons between the study and control groups. Taken together, our findings reveal that student achievement increased over the course of two academic years, with effect sizes amounting to about 60–80 % of a full standard deviation unit for German achievement, and to about two thirds to a full standard deviation unit for mathematics achievement. Furthermore, the findings did not reveal any evidence for higher increases in student achievement for the study group. We conclude that intensive longitudinal studies allow for examining change in student achievement over shorter time spans without confounding the findings with learning effects related to retest and discuss open questions for future research.