“Not All Learning Loss is Worthy of Panic:” Examining the COVID Slide
Within days of the first wave of COVID-19 school closures, the alarm bells rang: an extended hiatus from school was bound to lead to learning loss, a phenomenon we see every summer via which students regress in their math and reading abilities while school is out of session.
At the time, we had no idea just how much school would be completely lost. For some students and districts, it was even the entire spring and summer. Nor did we know how much of the school that did occur would happen remotely, the unfamiliar format posing new challenges for teachers and learners alike. But is it worth examining COVID learning loss in greater detail? Yes, if we’d like to move forward with minimal academic impacts.
The COVID slide is both real and measurable.
As first semester grades and test scores have trickled in, those early COVID-19 fears seem to have come to fruition. A 2020 McKinsey report found that, on average, students learned only 69% of the math skills that their grade-level counterparts mastered in previous years. NWEA similarly found that nearly twice as many 3rd-8th graders moved down one quintile in math achievement in 2020 than did so the previous year.
Logically, this makes sense. Students had, by nearly all accounts, a less effective spring semester than ever before. That was followed by a longer summer as many schools shut down early or delayed opening in the fall. And the backdrop for all of this change was a frazzled shift to remote instruction, with school districts and parents scrambling to outfit students with the equipment and infrastructure necessary to access e-learning, and teachers gallantly adjusting their lesson plans to fit this new reality.
Put another way: there was less time for learning, that learning was a new experience and challenge for all involved, and there were longer time periods for knowledge to atrophy. With these factors at play, we should consider it a win that reading progress was only marginally affected, if at all—or perhaps that’s a natural consequence of less socialization leaving more time for kids to enjoy the simple pleasure of reading books they love.
How worried should we be about this learning loss?
As the data has poured in measuring the degree of COVID learning loss, a healthy debate has emerged over just what that data measures and about what should be considered a success both in the COVID-19 schooling era and overall. There’s a time-honored debate over just what standardized tests—the basis for the vast majority of measured learning loss—can and do measure.
If on a test day upon her return to school in September a student has forgotten 20% of what she knew well in May, but in using those skills for the new semester's work she’s more than caught up in October, was learning loss really a problem? At an even deeper level, can learning and knowledge be deconstructed into accurately-assessable, meaningfully-measured components, or does that pursuit overlook that the whole of a student’s knowledge is greater than the sum of its parts?
Teachers have had to reckon not just with how to teach in an online environment, but also how to grade students amidst learning loss, technology limitations, and all of the other burdens that living through a pandemic has foisted upon students. Amidst recent education trends in social-emotional learning, growth mindset, and grit, doesn’t the current environment call for rewarding—and perhaps serve as the best opportunity to teach—those qualities, even if it means lessening the importance of certain state standards?
A recommendation...
One significant problem with measuring learning loss in terms of a percentage or percentile is that not all knowledge is created equal—in fact, it’s far from it.
In middle school geometry, for example, you might learn (and face test questions on) both triangles and rhombuses. The triangle is critical. In a few years, you’ll take a trigonometry class for which everything is based on triangles; much of astronomy is based on rules of right triangles; lots of engineering principles are based on triangles. But nothing (save for perhaps an SAT question someday) depends on the rhombus!
The meaning of this exercise? The sheer number or percentage of skills a student has mastered isn’t a direct driver of her success in future subjects and careers. There was a popular game show, Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?, built on this exact premise: much of what is covered in school is about learning how to learn, how to research, how to organize and convey thoughts. But some of that knowledge—like the rhombus—is fairly inconsequential, both in real life and in future grades and subjects.
But some knowledge is absolutely crucial. A student who hasn’t grasped the concepts of multiplication and division, for example, will struggle when it comes to adding and subtracting fractions, and then when algebra problems involve factoring, and so on. That foundational understanding of how multiplication and division work is a crucial layer upon which years of math is built. If that base isn’t solid, the new knowledge can’t build from it, and a student can fall dramatically behind. The same goes for foundational reading comprehension.
Not all skills are created equal, and so for parents and teachers concerned about making up for learning loss, these suggestions may be useful:
Certain skills are necessary gateways to future knowledge and ability. If a student doesn’t master them or receive help doing so before that new knowledge piles on, a short-term learning loss could ultimately become permanent. Core math and reading skills fall here, and they’re urgent. Teachers should overemphasize these skills even at the expense of others. Parents should identify these skills and consider supplemental education or reach out to a teacher for support.
Other skills are necessary, but can be caught up in parallel. Learning measurement, for example, for younger learners falls here—a student’s ability to read an analog clock isn’t necessary for using a ruler or scale, so although it’s an important skill to not ignore, a short-term learning loss here won’t become permanent. Teachers should ensure these skills get their fair due, but not at the expense of critical skills, and parents should be mindful that they may want to address these over the summer or as they come up in day-to-day life.
Some skills are good to know, but can and should give way to the importance of the era students are living in. Teachers know these skills well: they’ll show up on a district-mandated exam but likely never again, so they’re skippable if organic learning opportunities—an eclipse, a breaking news event, or a pandemic—arise. Teachers should (and do) feel comfortable downplaying these skills in class coverage to save time for critical and organic lessons and in grading to leave room to reward students for behavior, attitude, and participation. Parents should rest assured that not all learning loss is worthy of panic.
While teachers may look at these buckets of knowledge and know where every skill they teach slots, parents likely don’t. But parents do have options. For one, know that most teachers would be happy to be asked how to best prioritize—they’ve likely been thinking all school year of where they’d spend extra time if only they had it. And the supplemental education industry has for years been working on diagnostic and prioritization tools to design effective after-school and summer programs that lead to success in future grades and subjects.
As we examine the effects of COVID learning loss, it’s important to prioritize. Our primary goal as educators should be to avoid permanent or chronic learning loss and to ensure that students maintain their natural curiosity and a positive growth mindset. Likely that means that less is more: less attention on the “good to know, but inconsequential” skills leaves more time for crucial fundamentals, more room for grades that reward productive habits and attitudes, and more time to capitalize on an opportunity to teach lifelong lessons that won’t appear on a learning loss assessment, but that may well be the enduring success of education in the COVID era.
Brian Galvin is the Chief Academic Officer at Varsity Tutors.