In the Rush to COVID Recovery, Did We Forget About Our Youngest Learners?

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The country’s youngest elementary school students suffered steep academic setbacks in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – just like students in older grades. But new research shows that they aren’t catching back up to pre-pandemic levels in reading and math the way others are. And when it comes to math, many are falling even further behind.

The findings stand in stark contrast to older elementary-school students, who appeared to show accelerated growth and were making up for lost learning over time, and have prompted concerns over the enduring impact of disrupted foundational years.

“We were shocked when we first saw the data. The toll that the pandemic took on these young learners is striking, and we need to pay more attention and prioritize them,” says Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates.

“The data show that these students – these second-graders who were in preschool or were just toddlers during the pandemic – their learning was disrupted and now they are having a harder time recovering and, in some cases, are falling even further behind.” 

The Curriculum Associates report focused on how students who entered kindergarten through fourth grade in the fall of 2021 performed in math and reading over three years, and compared those scores against students who started prior to the pandemic. In doing so, researchers analyzed results from roughly 4 million students. The dataset is unique in that it includes younger children who don’t yet participate in federally-mandated state testing or the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which accounts for why most academic achievement data focuses on older grades. 

While the researchers found that younger students were either falling behind or consistently hovering below pre-pandemic levels in both subjects, they were most challenged by math. Students who were in second and third grade during the 2021-22 school year had bottomed out in their recovery, hovering below pre-pandemic achievement levels. Meanwhile, students who were in kindergarten or first grade at that time had been dropping further below historical trends. 

Even the younger students who were on grade level prior to the pandemic – a subgroup that generally showed less learning loss and quicker recovery times, including for the younger students in reading – were lagging significantly behind. And notably, they made less progress compared to their pre-pandemic peers regardless of whether they attended urban, suburban or rural schools. 

The same is not true of older elementary-school students in reading or math. Students who were in fourth grade during the 2021-22 school year, for example, were hitting pre-pandemic levels in reading and approaching them in math three years later in the spring of 2024.

Why younger students may be struggling 

“Our data don’t speak to the why,” Huff said. “But they do suggest that somewhere along the way these [younger] students did not pick up the foundational skills, the building blocks for reading and math – and especially math – that are crucial for their learning trajectory.”

Though the study was designed to show correlation and not causation, Huff and her team have a handful of working theories.

The pandemic wiped out a decade of progress in increasing enrollment in public preschools and kick-started a chronic absenteeism problem that continues today. Given that so many students missed out on pre-K or kindergarten – or received instruction virtually during those years – they may have missed a critical window of learning and development. And, research has long shown, less developed foundational skills can lead to the types of learning gaps the researchers found. 

Research also shows that certain moments in a child’s development are more sensitive to change than others. Children undergo significant brain growth between birth and age five, for example, but it can be negatively impacted by disruptions and stressors. The pandemic was a once-in-a-lifetime disruption. 

“For student learning, periods during which students build foundational skills – the skills most needed to advance learning – may be especially sensitive,” the researchers noted in their published findings. “Thus, disruptions during foundational skill development could create a compounding effect, making recovery a slow endeavor.”

Alongside that hypothesis is another: that the academic recovery efforts used by districts targeted students who were either further along in elementary school, or in middle and high school, or in grades participating in state exams. If that was the case, younger learners may have received less intervention support.

Of course, that’s virtually impossible to track given that districts allocated their state and federal pandemic recovery spending based on needs – staffing, tutoring, summer learning, social-emotional development, etc. – and not by grade-level. 

‘Math is a whole different story’

Angie Rosen, the director of curriculum and instruction at Little Silver Boro School District in New Jersey, says she knew right away that the small, high-performing school district had a problem when they brought back kindergarten and first grade students in November 2021. 

“Reading is one thing. Parents can read with kids. But math is a whole different story,” she says. “It’s more about understanding number sense, manipulating numbers and understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

To blunt the pandemic’s impact, Rosen organized intense professional development for math instruction for first and second grade teachers. 

“We knew that parents wouldn’t teach math like we were teaching math, so that’s where we started,” she says. “We worked hard at it.”

Rosen says the key to getting their students back on track has been to obsess over their benchmark data to figure out where students have stopped making recovery and plug those holes.

“You have to look at where the gaps are, look at where it’s not measuring up, and then target it and address it,” she says. “You can’t do every grade level and every year in every subject. But I think that’s our success – we pay attention to the data and use it.”

To be sure, the Curriculum Associate data is the first of its kind to suggest that the county’s youngest learners are uniquely stalled out and, in some cases, falling further behind. Some researchers caution that the doomsday finding hasn’t been replicated by other robust analyses of post-pandemic academic loss and recovery – though that’s due to the fact that standardized testing data does not exist for such young students. 

Researchers from Curriculum Associates acknowledge at least some limitations to their methodology and findings, including that despite the large sample size, the data is not nationally representative, they did not use matched samples and did not track the same students pre- and post-pandemic. 

Huff says the data should be a shot across the bow for school districts to invest more recovery resources on their youngest learners.

“We now know their growth trajectory is very much dependent upon how prepared they were when they come into school,” she says. “We want these data to inform helpful, targeted policies and practice. These are data based on millions of students and we know that there are educators, districts and students out there who are bucking the trend.”

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