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The next academic year will be the year of interim and formative assessment more than any other. Schools will go an unprecedented two years without summative data, and educators will have a heightened desire to know how students are performing and to what degree they experienced the “COVID-19 slide.”

Students’ academic status at the beginning of any school year always varies, but given the unusual nature of this past spring, teachers will see an even greater diversity of abilities and skills, along with larger gaps that will include skills that don’t typically need much review.

So how can educators quickly and efficiently fill those gaps and get their students up to speed and ready to tackle a new academic year? One solid strategy is to identify the foundational skills among those gaps and help students acquire those skills first.

Identifying Skills to Focus on

As long as standards have existed, teachers have intuitively known that there are absolutely essential skills commingled with secondary skills. This summer is a great time for them to dig in and identify exactly which skills in their subject, their grade level, and the prior grade are critical to accelerating learning and closing learning gaps. These Focus Skills serve as prerequisites for future learning and tend to be transferable, helping students to achieve success in adjacent domains and subjects.

Take, for example, state standards requiring students to learn to associate particular sounds with letters. It’s a very important early phonics lesson, and if students don’t master it, they’ll be held back in literacy indefinitely. That’s a skill educators can focus on to help students make the quickest, most enduring, and transferrable progress.

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