How to address COVID-19 impacts in middle school
by PRP Group, on 10/08/2021
I love this quote from a recent EdSurge article on the importance of valuing teachers: “The phrase ‘learning loss’ has become as widespread as ‘you’re on mute’ in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic.” As a former educator, I am in awe of the steadfast dedication that teachers, students, and families have applied to continued learning this school year, despite the many challenges. As a member of the Research & Design team at Renaissance, I am equally inspired by the student performance data that show the learning growth resulting from everyone’s dedication. I agree it’s time for the discussion to move away from “learning loss” and shift towards how to keep the growth momentum going.
In this blog, I’d like to dig into some of the findings from the new Winter Edition of How Kids Are Performing. The report compares the Fall 2020 and Winter 2020–2021 performance of 3.8 million students in grades 1–8 who completed a Star Early Literacy, Star Reading, and/or Star Math assessment in both time periods. I’ll focus specifically on (a) grade levels where we’re continuing to see some larger discrepancies between typical-year student performance and COVID-impacted performance, (b) some of the critical and potentially challenging skills that may be responsible, and (c) ideas for prioritizing instruction and classroom interaction time to accelerate student learning in these grades.