STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — When the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic forced schools across the country to close their campuses and move all students to remote learning in the spring, many researchers feared kids would fall behind.
But new research released Tuesday by NWEA, a non-profit provider of assessment solutions, reveals there were patterns of steady gains in reading and modest setbacks in math.
The research, Learning During COVID-19: Initial Findings on Students’ Reading and Math Achievement and Growth, is a follow-up to a study released by NWEA in April 2020, which projected the potential academic impact and learning loss of disruptions caused by the coronavirus.
“While our research highlights concerns, especially for math, the results show signs of optimism that is a reflection of a strong determination to serve our students,” said Chris Minnich, CEO of NWEA. “Since schools initially closed in March, we’ve seen educators and families step up and pull together in new collaborations to meet the challenge of instruction during COVID.”
The new study analyzed data from nearly 4.4 million U.S. students in grades three through eight who took assessments in fall 2020 to determine: how students performed this fall relative to a typical school year; how much students have grown academically since schools physically closed in March; how fall 2020 test scores compared to projections made by NWEA in April.
The study found that average scores for math were lower — between 5 and 10 percentile points — for students this year, compared to students in the same grade last year.
In almost all grades, most students made some learning gains in both reading and math since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. However, gains in math were lower on average this fall than in prior years — which means more students are falling behind relative to their prior standing.
“Preliminary fall data suggests that, on average, students are faring better than we had feared with continued academic progress in reading, and minor setbacks in math due to COVID-19-related school disruptions,” said Beth Tarasawa, executive vice president of research at NWEA. “While there’s some good news here, we want to stress that not all students are represented in the data, especially from our most marginalized communities. This increases the urgency to better connect to students and families who may be weathering the COVID storm very differently.”
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NWEA said some differences by racial and ethnic groups are emerging in the fall data, but it’s too early to draw conclusions from the initial results.
Students who were the most vulnerable to the pandemic’s impacts were more likely to be missing from data collection. NWEA said this means the non-profit has an incomplete understanding of how achievement may differ across student groups and may be underestimating the impacts of COVID-19.
The short- and long-term academic and non-academic impacts of the coronavirus aren’t yet fully understood and realized, NWEA said. For that reason, the organization has developed a robust research program to inform policies and practices to mitigate these impacts, focused on implications for equity.
Recommendations from NWEA include continuing federal and state funding to school districts impacted by the pandemic, transparency in data reporting to target resources to those most in need, and equitable access to high-quality math teaching and learning.
“Even through these diligent efforts, our data shows that school isn’t working for all students, so we must continue to provide support while also monitoring closely the multiple indicators that inform how students are weathering this pandemic,” said Minnich.
Noliwe Rooks, a professor of literature at Cornell University whose work explores such topics as race, capitalism and education, told the Advance/SILive.com at the time that students who know the basics, have an innate curiosity, and often test at the upper levels of standardized testing will do well in online learning. But for those who are grade levels behind and who don’t know the fundamentals, online learning “is often a complete disaster.”
“…The longer that this goes on and as long as we’re clear this is going to go on...the children who are struggling, who are already behind grade level, who are socio-economically vulnerable, who are homeless, are going to fall farther behind,” Rooks explained. “And that’s not my wish for them. But all the data that I know -- that’s what’s going to happen.”
“We remain very concerned about the needs of kids who are most at-risk,” said Raysa S. Rodriguez, associate executive director for policy and advocacy for Citizens’ Committee for Children, an independent, nonpartisan, privately supported child advocacy organization. “The crisis…they often say it doesn’t discriminate, everyone is impacted. But having said that, there are folks who are going to be hit the hardest in terms of not only recovery but managing through this crisis. So one group that that’s particularly true for is students of low-income families, as well as students in temporary housing.”
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