WICHITA — The summer slide. That’s the annual learning loss that happens when students spend three months away from school.
Now researchers warn about a “COVID slide.”
Students will have spent five months out of the classroom, shuttered because of the pandemic, when they return in August.
Clunky remote learning replaced longer hours and more rigorous instruction for the students still trying — and many have checked out for the year. Add the stress of an imploding economy that might have tossed Mom or Dad out of work plus limits on the emotional support schools often offer kids, and teachers will likely see already struggling students slip further behind.
“There will definitely be loss and there is a potential for even greater loss when they come back if schools don’t carefully understand how traumatic experiences impact learning,” said Alison Wishard Guerra, an associate professor at the University of California-San Diego’s department of education studies.
COVID slide
Researchers debate how much of an impact summer vacation has on student learning. While some say it costs students a full month, others say the “summer slide” is more of a summer slowdown, more a halt than a retreat.
But researchers at NWEA, a nonprofit that works on education assessments, used summer learning loss to model a “COVID slide.” Under the worst-case scenario, students would come back in the fall with roughly 70 percent of the learning gains they would have received during a full school year.
Math had the worst results, with some grades losing nearly a full year of learning. Compared to other subjects like reading, math gets much less attention outside of school.
“That’s not what we typically imagine when we think of the really, you know, wonderful parent-child bonding time,” Megan Kuhfeld said, a researcher at NWEA. “It’s not usually over math workbooks.”
That worst-case scenario, however, assumes no teaching happens between the March shutdown and when schools reopen.
Kansas schools hope to avoid that with remote learning, but what that looks like differs from district to district.
Wichita requires no assignments or attendance. The district locked in student grades, though high schoolers sweating their GPA or short of their graduation requirements can do extra work to boost their GPA.
The Barnes Hanover Linn school district, about an hour north of Manhattan, requires students to keep doing their work. Each day about 75% to 85% of the district’s kids log in for online learning, but that’s short of the district’s 97% attendance average from last year. Most student grades have held steady since the shutdown, though that’s with teachers focusing more on reviewing old material than teaching new material.
“We’ve backed off on the rigor,” said John Whetzal, superintendent of Barnes Hanover Linn. “But we do keep records of when kids are logging on, when kids are actually completing the work.”
