Researchers find that students made little or no progress while learning from home due to the school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning loss was most pronounced among students from disadvantaged homes.

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My wife normally teaches in a distance learning school. It has to look different than normal schooling and I’m not sure many schools did much to adapt. (Understandably, I also know that curriculum is built and planned.) As it’s a different medium that presents different challenges being handled by teachers and schools largely attempting to use the same model, I’d argue against anyone using this as a refutation of the concept, merely against the adaptation of the schooling methods being adapted. I am certain that many teachers and schools did the best they could with what they had, and my own knowledge of what was tried is limited to a largely American model classroom being adapted to zoom as mentioned on Reddit and by some teachers we know as well as bits and pieces of what I’ve been able to see elsewhere.

I had been working in academia on science education things before switching to teaching science in a high school last fall. We had a hybrid model. Many students were extremely poor at even logging into Canvas (our classroom management website) to even look at what they were supposed to do. I could have assigned a task of "log in and click this button," and at least a quarter of my students would have failed to do it. It occurred to me that this was entirely predictable based on what we know about college students. At a normal state university, something like a third of students fail out by the end of the fall of their sophomore year, mostly because of a lack of time management skills. (There are other reasons, to be sure, but not doing classwork or studying is the most important cause.) The hybrid model we used with students in class 2 days a week turns out to be really similar to the schedule of college students when you count up instructional hours and at-home hours. Of course, we should expect students who are less mature than college students to fail at the whole thing, and a lot of the ones who don't happen to have parents who are engaged enough to practically force them to do something. I don't even fault the parents who don't do that, as they're stressed out and often confused by the technology. We've gone to 4 days a week now, as the teachers are mostly vaccinated. (This may have been unwise for community health reasons, but I'm in a red suburb in a red state.) They're doing somewhat better with in-school work, but there are lingering problems with students not doing what they need to.

As a highschool teacher in the netherlands: the distance learning thing was better then nothing but let's stop doing this as soon as it's safe to do so.

Gotta point out that they measured “learning” by tests taken per week... I don’t know any learning scientists that think that is a reasonable metric.

I work in child safety and I have to say this research is helpful and not at all surprising. We had kids in homes with multiple siblings being told they must be dressed, at a desk or table, and in a quiet area - and they didn't have access to that, or to reliable high speed internet service. It set them up to fail repeatedly as not complying could mean punishment, time away from class, etc. Combine that with the fact that low-income parents were far more likely to have to continue to work outside the home, and they lacked the support wealthier students had with parents who were working from home, and of course those were disadvantaged compared to a full-time parent who wasn't working. Parents have come to us repeatedly saying that their kids need a support person with at least several hours available during the day, as live instruction is often limited to a short period of time. All of that being said, I hope this doesn't become ammunition for anti-lockdown folks, because disadvantaged families are far more likely to need to be more safe and more locked down as they're often families of color, multi-generational, have chronic or serious illness at home, etc. And besides, kids are often incredibly flexible with learning and we can create strategies to address learning loss or lack of progress.

Three percentile points.

College has had distance learning for many years. I worked on a pilot program with the CJ department of my University in about '99 with live streaming video and all kinds of cool stuff that wasn't really around at the time. The problem is that Elementary-HS has never done this before. Poor communication. A mix of nonsense assignments that teach nothing. Royalty free online books but not good ones. No published curricula, no published lesson plan. Lots of Youtube videos. Inconsistent/incoherent assignments. Many with incorrect answers. My daughter learned that the software grades on answering "True" in all regards so it doesn't matter what's right. It's a disaster. I do my best to talk to my kids and teach them what I know but it doesn't match the lesson plan that I'm not allowed to see. All I can do is go over the stuff that I would have learned in that grade. It's a mess. Both my kids want to go back to school. The problem is, they can't get vaccinated yet so I keep them home for distance learning. It's not the teacher's fault by any means. It's an unprepared district that did nothing over the summer break to make things better.

They fail to address the fact that these kids have experienced trauma and schedule disruption on a large scale: people tend to learn poorly during traumatic experiences, whether remote or in person. Trying to use this pandemic as an understanding of large scale online learning is missing a lit of factors, including the fact that it was a constant shift of learning styles to adapt. You need to do something consistently to get real data on it.

What's really gonna bake your noodle later is, they weren't making progress when school was in session either. Ignore the standardized tests and look at how people are when they get out of high school, have a conversation with them about things they allegedly know from the testing. Our system doesn't work normally, it just doesn't work in a different way when it's on zoom.

I'm a single dad to twins. I cannot understate how important for their education it has been for me to be unemployed. I've taken their homeschooling very seriously and though I'm struggling, I feel totally fine about it in relation to their future. If I were employed they would be falling behind. Despite this I am looking for work. It would have been nice had this country taken the pandemic threat seriously and shut it all down while providing decent financial assistance the entire time. None of these hardships would have been present had we had a unified federal response.

My fiance has an autistic little brother, with whom we live. He's 12, and a great kid. But school was impossible for him before Covid. He couldn't focus in class, he developed bad habits like letting his in-class aid do all the work for him, and he simply couldn't stay focused for 8 hours straight the way in person school demands. He has flourished under online learning. He's become more independent, his English has gotten noticeably better (a year ago he could barely string a few spoken sentences together, now if he has something to say or a question to ask, he can do it), he's become more confident, his grades are amazing, he's winning all kinds of awards his parents never thought he'd even be competitive for, he can write on his own now (this is huge - it used to take a painstaking hour working with him just to get him to write one sentence - now he doesn't even feel the need to come and ask for help; he just occasionally asks us to look over the finished work for grammar errors), and most importantly, he's so much happier. Headlines like this one are gonna leave kids like him in the dust, where they were before remote learning was an option.

I teach at a title 1 school and I have two students whom I’ve only seen for maybe the equivalent of a week of in person school. Their parents do not make them get on. My school is experiencing record low attendance and despite providing free internet and laptops to every student, they still don’t come. The only students who are learning are the ones in my classroom and the few virtual kids whose parents hold them accountable. We have sent social workers, contacted parents daily. Some parents blocked my number. I cannot teach kids who don’t show up or who just log on for the attendance but do not actually engage. Accountability has always been an issue, and schools lost the ability to hold students accountable and it all fell on the parents, who were busy trying to survive a pandemic.

Our kids 1st semester was fully online through the State of Colorado. They never once had a zoom meeting with a teacher, our son's 4th grade teacher only made herself available 1 hour a week for all her students. Fortunately for our kids and us my husband and I worked from home, so we were able to always check their work and help when they needed it. I always told my husband I could only imagine how difficult this is for kids whose parents have to be at work everyday out of their home. Looks like it was as bad as I thought.

Am I the only one that expected a larger impact? I’m surprised the loss was this modest.

Teen pregnancy is also down.

My girlfriend is tutoring a kid that has had a very rough time with distance learning for predictable reasons (rough home life to put things simply). It seems like she's a good kid but the world is trying to cause her to fail in every possible way.

Really curious comments and experiences here. My child began Kindergarten, completely virtually, and she can power up, log in, and complete her her day's work nearly on her own on a laptop. She's also damn near doing algebraic equations and reading entire books (Early readers) on her own. Maybe it's different because these are basics and learned by songs, images, and repetition. It was a successful year despite COVID.

I don't think it should surprise anyone that an impromptu alternative to the established structure of education hasn't been as effective. What I worry is that some will use this data as ammunition against covid restrictions, which is absurd. Children having to catch up a little is certainly better than them catching and spreading the virus.

I'm currently at university in Massachusetts and I can safely say my education is not nearly as good online as in person. I have a far harder time retaining information from online classes than I do in person. At least from my perspective, having in person classes let me have a great routine where I had definitive "class versus relax" time. Now that I'm just stuck in a single room apartment and can't go anywhere else for lectures, I eat, sleep, game, and learn in the same room. That, and most of my professors are not tech savvy and provide little in the way of virtual assistance on any matter.

My students are progressing, but it's nowhere near the progression you'd see with in person classes. I find that the opportunities to monitor are the biggest factors in my case. You almost always have to push a large chunk of the class just to get them to figure out what planet they're on in normal classes. Doing so online requires using platforms that allow real time monitoring of student progress. At first there would be one or two students done before the rest had figured out how to click on the link. Now it's actually a bit better. Gave some harsh participation grades to the kids who wouldn't even enter the document, and now I usually monitor as much of what they're doing as possible in real time with various platforms and apps. It's a constant struggle but it's definitely better than nothing. Still though, we had some in person classes before the most recent lock down and it is night and day. So much easier to clear up discrepancies when you don't have to say "What? Are you muted? Sorry, someone's mic is on so I can't hear you." 500 times a minute. Poor kids. That and "zoom fatigue" is real. It's hard enough keeping teenagers motivated normally, which isn't their fault. But now it's a different ballgame.

Do we really need a new scientific study every week to tell us that people from poor and disadvantaged homes are usually the most negatively affected by bad things? The hint is probably in the fact that they are referred to as 'disadvantaged homes'

Isn’t learning loss most pronounced from disadvantaged homes anyway? Isn’t that a redundant statement?

The thing the study missed is that I bet a large percentage of students don't write anything down when viewing an online class. The lack of note taking is probably the biggest contributor to the lack of learning.

This absolutely depends so strongly on the individual student, the community, and content delivery. I have students, especially students on the spectrum or with other concerns who have absolutely blossomed. They love that everything is laid out for them, distractions from classmates are minimized, and there is tons of support available that doesn't rely on waiting for the teacher to help them directly. They like having multiple formats to participate (audio, chat, DMs, etc) that can be adjusted based on comfort level and ways to demonstrate their learning that can be adapted based on their individual needs. My students in particular struggle with writing and being able to type has made a big difference for a lot of them. I also have students who are struggling because they have no time management or self-regulation skills. They're learning and absolutely progressing but it's been a tough road. The kids that are falling behind are those that just don't have access. And, honestly, its an entirely different and massively concerning issue that we have so many families living with such little support or consistency and without access to essential services and tools (internet). It's more frustrating to me than anything that shoving kids back into schools, even if it isn't safe for them and/or staff, is being used to deflect away from this issue.

Is anyone surprised? Even the teachers couldn’t bother to be engaged over their video meetings/classes... Not ALL obviously some teachers were. But they sadly didn’t appear to be the majority.

Well as a student (highschool junior) I beg to differ. Going into lockdown my grades were BAD especially in my ap classes and after the few months in quarentine, I was able to up my grades substantially (ex ap chem semester 1 D+ semester 2 A) and passed both of my ap tests. I am in 3 ap classes and as a child with severe adhd ocd and anxiety, distance learning is wayyyy better bc theres no distractions, home distractions I can deal with (4 siblings) so for me distance learning has been extremely good to me Then again this is MY opinion, not everyone is like this, so it can differ

Their methods seem fie, but I don't understand the so-what of this article. It sounds like the so-what is that about 8 weeks of learning were lost in the Netherlands due to covid school closures in 2020, but what's important about that? Also, as someone unfamiliar with the construct, is learning loss something people should be paying attention to or is it just a consequence of life happening in an inequitable world?

This is the highest cost of the pandemic long term. Closing schools should always be the absolute last resort. After every bar, every shop, everything else.