Testing Data Shows Middle Schoolers Are Further Behind in Science Than in 2021

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Middle schoolers are still lagging months behind pre-pandemic achievement levels in science, according to newly released test scores. Disturbingly, their losses in the subject have actually grown since the worst days of the COVID crisis. 

The scores, released Tuesday by the nonprofit testing group NWEA, serve as more evidence of a trend that has stood out in earlier data: Students who were still in elementary school when the pandemic began are experiencing particularly worrisome setbacks as schools try to chart a path to academic recovery. Meanwhile, today’s elementary schoolers have nearly returned to the levels of learning last seen in 2019.

This summer, NWEA circulated scores from their widely used MAP Growth assessment of math and reading. The results, which included the performance of nearly eight million American students from grades 3–8, revealed that today’s eighth graders were a full year behind 2019 learning in both subjects. By contrast, learning delays for third graders were only about one-quarter that size. 

In general, learning loss in science has been less significant than for core disciplines like math and reading because STEM instruction is comparatively limited in the early grades. In a 2018 survey, elementary teachers said they spent only 18 minutes each day focusing on science, compared with about an hour on math and 1.5 hours on reading. 

Susan Kowalski, an NWEA senior researcher who worked on the report, said the scores showed that students who experienced their foundational years of STEM instruction in 2020 and 2021 were now struggling to cope.

“If science is taught at all in elementary school, it’s in the fourth and fifth grades,” Kowalski reflected. “So in 2021, those were the kids who were hardest hit in science, and they are now seventh and eighth graders who have never really rebounded.”

The latest data is drawn from 621 public schools that consistently administered the MAP Growth Science test to the same grade levels between 2017 and 2024. This ongoing sample allowed the research team to measure students this spring against not only those in the pre-COVID period, but also during the initial phases of the pandemic, when tens of millions of students were receiving virtual instruction. 

Those results show that, by the spring of 2021, students across all tested grades had fallen significantly behind in science, with especially sizable learning losses mounting in grades 4 and 5. But elementary schoolers have since recovered the most ground compared with their same-age predecessors of three years ago, with learning gaps reduced by 50% for third graders, 82% for fifth graders, and 33% for sixth graders. Fourth graders, whose performance dropped the furthest during the early stages of the pandemic, have now fully returned to their 2019-era achievement levels in science.

But the gaps for older students — essentially, those who saw the biggest dips three years ago — have grown with time. In 2021, NWEA estimated that seventh and eighth graders would require 0.9 and 1.7 months of additional science instruction, respectively, to catch up to where similar students had been in 2019; by 2024, the projection for students in that grade had grown to 1.7 and 3.2 months of supplemental learning, respectively. 

In other words, kids’ whose initial encounters with science were thwarted by the COVID shock appear to be falling further behind, even as state and federal leaders have provided school districts with billions of dollars to lead recovery efforts. 

Heidi Schweingruber, the director of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board of Science Education, said that students’ halting progress in science could constrain their life chances in the future. Adolescents begin to develop aspirations for college and career only a few years after they receive their first lessons in science.

“If they’re missing that foundation and can’t follow a strong pathway into high school science, are we closing doors for them in terms of what they might consider after graduation?” Schweingruber asked. “Middle school is the time when kids are starting to develop an identity of who they want to be.”

As other testing data have indicated previously, the pandemic also significantly widened achievement gaps separating students along racial lines. While middle schoolers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds had fallen behind in science by the spring of 2021, Hispanic students lost more ground than their white classmates. Among eighth graders, Hispanics required a projected 3.4 months of academic recovery in 2021 and 6.3 months in 2024; whites in the same age cohort needed 0.5 months of recovery in 2021 and 1.6 months now.

Black students, who have mostly bounced back from the science losses sustained in 2020 and 2021, are still, on average, between 10 and 15 months behind the average achievement levels for children in their grades. Hispanic students, whose progress has only stalled further since 2021, are almost as badly off. 

Erika Shugart, CEO of the National Science Teaching Association, said in a statement that she wasn’t surprised to see negative impacts concentrated among middle schoolers, though she added that persistent gaps in STEM instruction could prove economically and socially destructive in the long run.

“The U.S. is already facing significant challenges producing a STEM-ready workforce,” Shugart wrote. “Science literacy is crucial for making informed decisions about health, the environment, and technology. Falling behind in science education can impair individuals’ ability to engage with and understand complex issues, affecting personal and societal well-being.”

To combat lost science learning, NWEA’s authors recommended different strategies to curb chronic absenteeism, entice students to participate in summer learning opportunities, and weave science instruction into middle school reading instruction, which research suggests could improve performance in both subjects.

Kowalski said that, more than any particular approach, educators needed to embrace a “mentality shift” away from remediation and toward learning acceleration. A former high school physics instructor, she argued that schools can’t get their pupils back on track simply by offering them what they missed four years ago.

“They can’t succumb to low expectations and say, ‘These students are behind, so I need to slow down.’ It’s more like, ‘These students are behind, so I need to accelerate.’”

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