NC students are starting to recover some pandemic learning loss, new report says
Students have made the biggest gains in math, smaller gains in science and the smallest gains in reading.
Posted — UpdatedIn a statement, state Superintendent Catherine Truitt said the data back up what she and department officials have been hearing from educators and parents in the state.
“Our schools and districts have made incredible strides in helping so many of our students get back on track to their pre-pandemic performance,” Truitt said. “This data also tells us there is more work to be done, and fortunately we still have federal funding available to support interventions targeted at the students who need it most.”
Researchers projected student performance based on pre-pandemic tests scores against their actual performance after the pandemic began. That analysis is intended show how far off students fell from their expected academic progress, while in-person learning was closed or limited during the pandemic.
Then, the department and SAS Institute measured the difference and converted it into a rough estimate of “months” behind in learning.
The progress to the 2022 test scores shows students still have learning to make up but not as much as they did last year. That means students in many cases learned more than a year’s worth of material in just one school year.
The data don’t include progress made this school year, as students haven’t yet completed springtime standardized testing.
The department used both state standardized tests and, for younger students, mClass reading tests taken before third grade, when standardized tests begin. Researchers struggled to reliably predict test performance in math and science from mClass data, so they did not calculate the months of learning lost for elementary math or science and only calculated it for elementary reading.
Lawmakers said the analysis shows just how important in-person learning is and just how wrong closing schools and switching to remote learning was during the pandemic.
COVID-19 has killed more than 28,000 North Carolinians. Cases peaked in the winter of the 2021-22 school year.
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