Students have lost a third of an academic year to the pandemic, study finds

Learning delays and regressions were most severe in developing countries and among children from low-income backgrounds. And students still haven't caught up.

Children experienced learning deficits during the Covid pandemic that accounted for about a third of knowledge and skills. skills a school year, according to a new global analysis, and had not recovered from those losses more than two years later.

Delays in learning and regressions were most severe in developing countries and among students in developing countries according to the researchers, exacerbating existing disparities and threatening to follow children into higher education and the labor market.

The analysis, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior and drawing on data from 15 countries, provided the most comprehensive account to date of the academic difficulties caused by the pandemic. The results suggest that the challenges of remote learning – coupled with other stressors that have plagued children and families throughout the pandemic – were not corrected when the school doors closed. reopened.

"In order to recover what has been lost, we need to do more than just get back to normal," said Bastian Betthäuser, a researcher at the Center for Research on social inequalities at Sciences Po in Paris, co-author of the review.He urged officials around the world to come up with intensive summer programs and tutoring initiatives that target the poorest students who are falling furthest behind. Harvard, which has studied school interruptions in the United States, revised the overall analysis. Without immediate and aggressive intervention, he said, "learning loss will be the most lasting and most unfairness of the pandemic."

A Before Covid, crises such as the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and persistent teacher strikes in Argentina have shown that long-term school absenteeism can have lasting effects. But none had been compared to the reach of Covid: around 1.6 billion children worldwide missed a significant amount of class time during the peak of the pandemic, according to Unicef.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">To quantify the impact, the investigators combined results from 42 different studies published between March 2020 and August 2022, covering middle- and high-income countries in the Americas, Europe and Africa southern. Global education deficits were equivalent to about 35% of a school year and remained "incredibly stable" in the years that followed, Betthäuser said, as students stopped losing further ground but n didn't bounce back either.

The delays were worse in math than in reading, Betthäuser said, possibly because math requires more instruction. formal and because reading comprehension generally improves with brain development as children get older. The data shows that students of lower socioeconomic status bore much of the burden, likely because they faced noisy study spaces, spotty internet connections, and economic turmoil.

Dr. Damon Korb, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician who founded the Center for Developing Minds, wasn't surprised to find that learning deficits were consistent across all grade levels. He said many of the young children he cared for struggled to get back into classrooms quickly because they needed to relearn ba...