Projecting the Potential Impact of COVID-19 School Closures on Academic Achievement

By Megan Kuhfeld, J. Soland, Beth Tarasawa, Angela Johnson, Erik A. Ruzek, Jing Liu. Educational Research, 2020

783 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As the COVID-19 pandemic upended the 2019–2020 school year, education systems scrambled to meet the needs of students and families with little available data on how school closures may impact learning. In this study, we produced a series of projections of COVID-19-related learning loss based on (a) estimates from absenteeism literature and (b) analyses of summer learning patterns of 5 million students. Under our projections, returning students are expected to start fall 2020 with approximately 63 to 68% of the learning gains in reading and 37 to 50% of the learning gains in mathematics relative to a typical school year. However, we project that losing ground during the school closures was not universal, with the top third of students potentially making gains in reading.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Education, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae380fc6a86e9cb643e4ddbb49ffa5ef26095404

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Citations in the corpus

Suffering in silence: How COVID-19 school closures inhibit the reporting of child maltreatment (2020, background): “Indeed, early projections of learning losses associated with COVID-19 school closures show students are likely to return in fall 2020 with approximately 37–50% of the learning gains in math relative to a typical school year (Kuhfeld et al., 2020).”
Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic (2021, neutral): “Schools and teachers have been struggling to adopt online-based solutions for instruction, let alone for assessment and accountability (10, 19).”