COVID-19 Learning Loss: Questions and Promising Practices.
| Author | Crawley, William R. |
COVID Learning Loss: Questions and Promising Practices
Introduction
Learning loss is a topic that has been of interest for some time. School personnel have expressed concerns that students might not retain foundational knowledge in subject areas and would find it difficult to move to more difficult tasks in the school curriculum that build on previously introduced information (Alexander, Entwisle, & Olson, 2007). This is particularly true with students who are struggling in school (Bowers & Schwarz, 2018).
It is not unusual to find that teachers spend time during the initial stages of a class to review material that was presented in the previous prerequisite class in which the student was enrolled with the belief that the student may have forgotten or not retained previously learned material. This may be an entirely valid issue and it does illustrate educators' concerns related to learning loss.
Learning loss takes many forms. In a very familiar illustration is the student who is able to answer questions Friday after an instructional period. Teachers will sometimes note that the student 'knows' the material on Friday only to find out that the student cannot correctly respond to the taught material on Monday. Teachers may explain this as an illustration of a 'learning loss.'
Likewise, longer term learning loss is illustrated by students who scored well on a test at the end of the school year but were unable to use the material when school resumed in the fall. In the same vein, school administrators may have found that some children who reportedly did well on their studies and received high grades for their classwork, did not perform well on a subsequent standardized test. In many of these cases, the blame was put on the child as being unmotivated or ascribed to a condition in which the child was simply not a 'good test taker'. School personnel often missed the point that students may have been accurate on a task but slow in their rate of response. The slowness of response maybe seen as an indication that the child may not have adequately learned the task.
Percentage of correct responses do show accuracy but accuracy alone fails to distinguish the difference between a child who is highly accurate but is in the initial stages of learning and one who is proficient, accurate, and can comfortably use the skill at a functional rate. Therefore, the child who is accurate but slow may not have adequately learned a task so that it is remembered or could be used in a functional manner. Thus, what seemed to be a measure of student learning using just percentage of correct responses is shown to be an inadequate measure of learning by not considering the rate of the student's response.
COVID-19 and Learning Loss
Presently, there is great interest in learning loss as it applies to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and the degree to which students could not retain previously taught material or may have fallen behind academically due to a disruption in their educational setting. This disruption could be due to the cancellation of school and/or the implementation of remote learning through delivery of instruction via the internet. Schoolwork electronically sent home to the child or the absence of an organized curriculum that is designed to meet the child's needs could have been contributing factors in the child's learning of academic skills.
The recent pandemic and alterations in the delivery of student academic content has raised the specter of the fear of student learning loss. The COVID-19 epidemic was an unparalleled challenge to schools in all countries. Some schools stayed in session and simply sent students home if the student tested positive for COVID-19. Other schools dismissed the entire class for home study if one student tested positive, and, yet other school areas simply cancelled classes and established some form of home study in hopes that the epidemic would abate, and students could be called back to school.
The pandemic was real and produced significant problems, but it may be difficult to know the exact extent of the problems such as student growth, possible disproportionate effects of the effects that alternate curriculum delivery models had on specific populations, what mitigating interventions were effective and the effect that changes in the delivery had on home life, and challenging problems. These are questions that can only be answered with more research, but there are some important clues as to the effects of COVID-19 on student learning.
Currently, research only hints at some of the answers related to the effects of COVID-19 on various school populations. Researchers have identified some instructional variables and policy decisions that seem to have been effective, however, research will provide more definitive answers.
In 2022, the Nation's Report Card references data from National Center for Educations Statistics (NCES) indicating that the test scores of fourth graders who are nine years of age in the United States declined in reading and math during the COVID-19 pandemic. They note, however, that some groups, such as those in the lower quartile in reading and mathematics, had greater losses than those in the upper quartiles. They also noted that some groups had little loss such as those in urban areas. NCES notes that these are preliminary data and do not address the disparity of scores that may exist between schools related to instructional procedures, in person learning versus remote learning and that the reported effect may not be typical of learners of all ages.
Barnum (2022) reports data from the NWEA (a research-based organization that provides support to educators and students) which indicate that in 2021, students' reading scores fell 3 - 6% and mathematics scores fell 8 - 12%. In 2022, students made more progress in reading and mathematics as compared to the previous year. The data came from 8 million students and suggested that after one year of post pandemic instruction during which schools were open, students made up 30% of their learning loss. The data suggest that learning loss was real and point to marginalized students having a greater learning loss than other groups who had higher initial performance scores. Nonetheless, as Camp (2022) noted, these losses were not inevitable but resulted from some of the decisions made by school leaders such as the closing of schools and facing the challenges of remote delivery of instruction.
Adding to the effects are a host of unanticipated problems or 'echo' problems. Issues such as teacher retention and school attendance certainly existed before the pandemic but came to be much more serious problems during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic and its effect on school is a tangled problem that involves numerous components. It is not a simple problem with easy answers. Rather, it is complex and involves issues with data definitions and projections that create numerous unanswered questions. As in most cases, however, data suggest that some interventions and curriculum delivery models were found to be more effective than others. Additionally, we know that many students did experience difficulties in school during the pandemic, but it is important to remember that teachers did as well as they could being asked to make sudden changes in curriculum delivery often without adequate assistance. Clearly, schools and parents worked hard to ameliorate student concerns during the pandemic, but they were faced with new problems and timelines for decisions that put a good deal of strain on students, teachers, and parents.
There seems to be, however, broad agreement that the lessons that...
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