COVID impact on students

When students, educators, and administrators return to school after the COVID-19 closures, classrooms will be a changed landscape, one likely marked by larger equity gaps, substantial learning loss for many students, and continued economic turmoil for our most marginalized families.

While it is difficult to speculate on what missing months of school may mean for student achievement, research on seasonal learning and summer learning loss can offer some insights that can help educators, policymakers, and families understand, plan for, and address some potential impacts of this extended pause in classroom instruction when students return to school.

My colleagues and I compared academic achievement trajectories during a typical school year for grades 3–8 where no disruption to learning took place to two scenarios that could result from school closures: a COVID-19 slide, in which students show patterns of learning loss typical of summers throughout the extended closures, and a COVID-19 slowdown, in which students maintain the same level of academic achievement they had when schools were closed (modeled for simplicity as beginning March 15) until schools reopen.

The Covid-19 pandemic may worsen existing mental health problems and lead to more cases among children and adolescents because of the unique combination of the public health crisis, social isolation, and their economic.

Many students may face greater food insecurity, loss of family income, loss of family members to the coronavirus, and fear of catching the virus themselves. While the scale of the COVID-19 school closures is novel, the inequalities in our school systems are unfortunately anything but new. Virtually all K-12 students in the United States are currently missing face-to-face instruction due to COVID-19. Many parents and teachers like myself thus share a common worry:

When the pandemic subsides, kids will return to school with lower achievement.

There are also concerns that the gap between high- and low-achieving students will become larger.

Given the need to address these concerns, we decided to use prior test scores from millions of students and leverage research on summer learning patterns to make informal projects of what learning loss due to the pandemic might look like. Ultimately, we wanted to know: What sort of learning losses could we expect from the shortened 2019-20 school year?

Answering this question is complicated by the unique circumstances of COVID-19.

Current school closures have added to the time that most students already spend at home during the summer months without explicit face-to-face instruction from teachers.

Meanwhile, teachers like myself is scrambling to adapt content for an online platform and parents are juggling work responsibilities (if not joblessness) with caring for and educating their own children. Students themselves are faced with isolation, about a deadly virus, and uncertainty about the future.

Preliminary estimates suggest impacts may be larger in math than in reading and that students may return in fall 2020 with less than 50% of typical learning gains and, in some grades, nearly a full year behind what we would expect in this subject in normal conditions.

Educators will need data now more than ever to guide curriculum and instruction to support students. Accurate, valid, and reliable data can provide valuable diagnostic information in times of disruption and uncertainty, especially to determine where to focus resources and how best to help students academically.

In so many ways, the current situation is unprecedented for most people No matter what form school takes when the new year begins—whether students and teachers are back in the school building together or still at home—teachers will face a pressing issue: How can they help students recover and stay on track throughout the year even as their lives are likely to continue to be disrupted by the pandemic?