Abstract:
Mobility negatively impacts student achievement as students experience gaps inreading development skills as they transfer schools. As a student moves they lose socialinteraction and connectedness with teachers and other students. These social interactionsand connections are needed for the student to progress academically. The purpose of thisstudy was to determine the impact of student mobility on the reading development skillsof a cohort of elementary students in first, second, and third grade using the NWEAreading assessment. Archival NWEA data was collected from District A, an urbanschool district in the Midwest, to complete the study.Research questions were developed to address four main areas: (1) The impactmobility has on students NWEA MAP reading achievement growth in language andwriting; (2) The impact mobility has on students NWEA MAP reading achievementgrowth in vocabulary; (3) The impact mobility has on students NWEA MAP readingachievement growth in literature; (4) The impact mobility has on students NWEA MAPreading achievement growth in overall RIT composite score. The study included a cohortof 565 students who were in first grade in 2013, second grade in 2014, and third grade in2015. A two-way repeated measures ANOVA was conducted to test each hypothesis.The results of the study indicated there was a statistically significant interactioneffect of Time*Mobility for all research questions. A statistically significant interactionwas found for the main effects of time and mobility for vocabulary, literature, and RITcomposite score. There was not a statistically significant main effect for mobility inlanguage and writing