elementary education articles 2020

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Our Best Education Articles of 2020

In February of 2020, we launched the new website Greater Good in Education , a collection of free, research-based and -informed strategies and practices for the social, emotional, and ethical development of students, for the well-being of the adults who work with them, and for cultivating positive school cultures. Little did we know how much more crucial these resources would become over the course of the year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, as we head back to school in 2021, things are looking a lot different than in past years. Our most popular education articles of 2020 can help you manage difficult emotions and other challenges at school in the pandemic, all while supporting the social-emotional well-being of your students.

In addition to these articles, you can also find tips, tools, and recommended readings in two resource guides we created in 2020: Supporting Learning and Well-Being During the Coronavirus Crisis and Resources to Support Anti-Racist Learning , which helps educators take action to undo the racism within themselves, encourage their colleagues to do the same, and teach and support their students in forming anti-racist identities.

Here are the 10 best education articles of 2020, based on a composite ranking of pageviews and editors’ picks.

Can the Lockdown Push Schools in a Positive Direction? , by Patrick Cook-Deegan: Here are five ways that COVID-19 could change education for the better.

How Teachers Can Navigate Difficult Emotions During School Closures , by Amy L. Eva: Here are some tools for staying calm and centered amid the coronavirus crisis.

Six Online Activities to Help Students Cope With COVID-19 , by Lea Waters: These well-being practices can help students feel connected and resilient during the pandemic.

Help Students Process COVID-19 Emotions With This Lesson Plan , by Maurice Elias: Music and the arts can help students transition back to school this year.

How to Teach Online So All Students Feel Like They Belong , by Becki Cohn-Vargas and Kathe Gogolewski: Educators can foster belonging and inclusion for all students, even online.

How Teachers Can Help Students With Special Needs Navigate Distance Learning , by Rebecca Branstetter: Kids with disabilities are often shortchanged by pandemic classroom conditions. Here are three tips for educators to boost their engagement and connection.

How to Reduce the Stress of Homeschooling on Everyone , by Rebecca Branstetter: A school psychologist offers advice to parents on how to support their child during school closures.

Three Ways to Help Your Kids Succeed at Distance Learning , by Christine Carter: How can parents support their children at the start of an uncertain school year?

How Schools Are Meeting Social-Emotional Needs During the Pandemic , by Frances Messano, Jason Atwood, and Stacey Childress: A new report looks at how schools have been grappling with the challenges imposed by COVID-19.

Six Ways to Help Your Students Make Sense of a Divisive Election , by Julie Halterman: The election is over, but many young people will need help understanding what just happened.

Train Your Brain to Be Kinder (video), by Jane Park: Boost your kindness by sending kind thoughts to someone you love—and to someone you don’t get along with—with a little guidance from these students.

From Othering to Belonging (podcast): We speak with john a. powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, about racial justice, well-being, and widening our circles of human connection and concern.

About the Author

Greater good editors.

The pandemic has had devastating impacts on learning. What will it take to help students catch up?

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, megan kuhfeld , megan kuhfeld senior research scientist - nwea @megankuhfeld jim soland , jim soland assistant professor, school of education and human development - university of virginia, affiliated research fellow - nwea @jsoland karyn lewis , and karyn lewis director, center for school and student progress - nwea @karynlew emily morton emily morton research scientist - nwea @emily_r_morton.

March 3, 2022

As we reach the two-year mark of the initial wave of pandemic-induced school shutdowns, academic normalcy remains out of reach for many students, educators, and parents. In addition to surging COVID-19 cases at the end of 2021, schools have faced severe staff shortages , high rates of absenteeism and quarantines , and rolling school closures . Furthermore, students and educators continue to struggle with mental health challenges , higher rates of violence and misbehavior , and concerns about lost instructional time .

As we outline in our new research study released in January, the cumulative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ academic achievement has been large. We tracked changes in math and reading test scores across the first two years of the pandemic using data from 5.4 million U.S. students in grades 3-8. We focused on test scores from immediately before the pandemic (fall 2019), following the initial onset (fall 2020), and more than one year into pandemic disruptions (fall 2021).

Average fall 2021 math test scores in grades 3-8 were 0.20-0.27 standard deviations (SDs) lower relative to same-grade peers in fall 2019, while reading test scores were 0.09-0.18 SDs lower. This is a sizable drop. For context, the math drops are significantly larger than estimated impacts from other large-scale school disruptions, such as after Hurricane Katrina—math scores dropped 0.17 SDs in one year for New Orleans evacuees .

Even more concerning, test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20% in math (corresponding to 0.20 SDs) and 15% in reading (0.13 SDs), primarily during the 2020-21 school year. Further, achievement tended to drop more between fall 2020 and 2021 than between fall 2019 and 2020 (both overall and differentially by school poverty), indicating that disruptions to learning have continued to negatively impact students well past the initial hits following the spring 2020 school closures.

These numbers are alarming and potentially demoralizing, especially given the heroic efforts of students to learn and educators to teach in incredibly trying times. From our perspective, these test-score drops in no way indicate that these students represent a “ lost generation ” or that we should give up hope. Most of us have never lived through a pandemic, and there is so much we don’t know about students’ capacity for resiliency in these circumstances and what a timeline for recovery will look like. Nor are we suggesting that teachers are somehow at fault given the achievement drops that occurred between 2020 and 2021; rather, educators had difficult jobs before the pandemic, and now are contending with huge new challenges, many outside their control.

Clearly, however, there’s work to do. School districts and states are currently making important decisions about which interventions and strategies to implement to mitigate the learning declines during the last two years. Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) investments from the American Rescue Plan provided nearly $200 billion to public schools to spend on COVID-19-related needs. Of that sum, $22 billion is dedicated specifically to addressing learning loss using “evidence-based interventions” focused on the “ disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on underrepresented student subgroups. ” Reviews of district and state spending plans (see Future Ed , EduRecoveryHub , and RAND’s American School District Panel for more details) indicate that districts are spending their ESSER dollars designated for academic recovery on a wide variety of strategies, with summer learning, tutoring, after-school programs, and extended school-day and school-year initiatives rising to the top.

Comparing the negative impacts from learning disruptions to the positive impacts from interventions

To help contextualize the magnitude of the impacts of COVID-19, we situate test-score drops during the pandemic relative to the test-score gains associated with common interventions being employed by districts as part of pandemic recovery efforts. If we assume that such interventions will continue to be as successful in a COVID-19 school environment, can we expect that these strategies will be effective enough to help students catch up? To answer this question, we draw from recent reviews of research on high-dosage tutoring , summer learning programs , reductions in class size , and extending the school day (specifically for literacy instruction) . We report effect sizes for each intervention specific to a grade span and subject wherever possible (e.g., tutoring has been found to have larger effects in elementary math than in reading).

Figure 1 shows the standardized drops in math test scores between students testing in fall 2019 and fall 2021 (separately by elementary and middle school grades) relative to the average effect size of various educational interventions. The average effect size for math tutoring matches or exceeds the average COVID-19 score drop in math. Research on tutoring indicates that it often works best in younger grades, and when provided by a teacher rather than, say, a parent. Further, some of the tutoring programs that produce the biggest effects can be quite intensive (and likely expensive), including having full-time tutors supporting all students (not just those needing remediation) in one-on-one settings during the school day. Meanwhile, the average effect of reducing class size is negative but not significant, with high variability in the impact across different studies. Summer programs in math have been found to be effective (average effect size of .10 SDs), though these programs in isolation likely would not eliminate the COVID-19 test-score drops.

Figure 1: Math COVID-19 test-score drops compared to the effect sizes of various educational interventions

$Figure 1 – Math COVID-19 test-score drops compared to the effect sizes of various educational interventions$

Source: COVID-19 score drops are pulled from Kuhfeld et al. (2022) Table 5; reduction-in-class-size results are from pg. 10 of Figles et al. (2018) Table 2; summer program results are pulled from Lynch et al (2021) Table 2; and tutoring estimates are pulled from Nictow et al (2020) Table 3B. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are shown with vertical lines on each bar.

Notes: Kuhfeld et al. and Nictow et al. reported effect sizes separately by grade span; Figles et al. and Lynch et al. report an overall effect size across elementary and middle grades. We were unable to find a rigorous study that reported effect sizes for extending the school day/year on math performance. Nictow et al. and Kraft & Falken (2021) also note large variations in tutoring effects depending on the type of tutor, with larger effects for teacher and paraprofessional tutoring programs than for nonprofessional and parent tutoring. Class-size reductions included in the Figles meta-analysis ranged from a minimum of one to minimum of eight students per class.

Figure 2 displays a similar comparison using effect sizes from reading interventions. The average effect of tutoring programs on reading achievement is larger than the effects found for the other interventions, though summer reading programs and class size reduction both produced average effect sizes in the ballpark of the COVID-19 reading score drops.

Figure 2: Reading COVID-19 test-score drops compared to the effect sizes of various educational interventions

Source: COVID-19 score drops are pulled from Kuhfeld et al. (2022) Table 5; extended-school-day results are from Figlio et al. (2018) Table 2; reduction-in-class-size results are from pg. 10 of Figles et al. (2018) ; summer program results are pulled from Kim & Quinn (2013) Table 3; and tutoring estimates are pulled from Nictow et al (2020) Table 3B. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are shown with vertical lines on each bar.

Notes: While Kuhfeld et al. and Nictow et al. reported effect sizes separately by grade span, Figlio et al. and Kim & Quinn report an overall effect size across elementary and middle grades. Class-size reductions included in the Figles meta-analysis ranged from a minimum of one to minimum of eight students per class.

There are some limitations of drawing on research conducted prior to the pandemic to understand our ability to address the COVID-19 test-score drops. First, these studies were conducted under conditions that are very different from what schools currently face, and it is an open question whether the effectiveness of these interventions during the pandemic will be as consistent as they were before the pandemic. Second, we have little evidence and guidance about the efficacy of these interventions at the unprecedented scale that they are now being considered. For example, many school districts are expanding summer learning programs, but school districts have struggled to find staff interested in teaching summer school to meet the increased demand. Finally, given the widening test-score gaps between low- and high-poverty schools, it’s uncertain whether these interventions can actually combat the range of new challenges educators are facing in order to narrow these gaps. That is, students could catch up overall, yet the pandemic might still have lasting, negative effects on educational equality in this country.

Given that the current initiatives are unlikely to be implemented consistently across (and sometimes within) districts, timely feedback on the effects of initiatives and any needed adjustments will be crucial to districts’ success. The Road to COVID Recovery project and the National Student Support Accelerator are two such large-scale evaluation studies that aim to produce this type of evidence while providing resources for districts to track and evaluate their own programming. Additionally, a growing number of resources have been produced with recommendations on how to best implement recovery programs, including scaling up tutoring , summer learning programs , and expanded learning time .

Ultimately, there is much work to be done, and the challenges for students, educators, and parents are considerable. But this may be a moment when decades of educational reform, intervention, and research pay off. Relying on what we have learned could show the way forward.

Elementary school teachers’ perspectives about learning during the COVID-19 pandemic

Aymee Alvarez-Rivero ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0489-5708 1 ,
Candice Odgers 2 , 3 &
Daniel Ansari ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7625-618X 1

npj Science of Learning volume 8 , Article number: 40 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

4142 Accesses

16 Altmetric

Metrics details

How did school closures affect student access to education and learning rates during the COVID-19 pandemic? How did teachers adapt to the new instructional contexts? To answer these questions, we distributed an online survey to Elementary School teachers ( N = 911) in the United States and Canada at the end of the 2020–2021 school year. Around 85.8% of participants engaged in remote instruction, and nearly half had no previous experience teaching online. Overall, this transition was challenging for most teachers and more than 50% considered they were not as effective in the classroom during remote instruction and reported not being able to deliver all the curriculum expected for their grade. Despite the widespread access to digital technologies in our sample, nearly 65% of teachers observed a drop in class attendance. More than 50% of participants observed a decline in students’ academic performance, a growth in the gaps between low and high-performing students, and predicted long-term adverse effects. We also observed consistent effects of SES in teachers’ reports. The proportion of teachers reporting a drop in performance increases from 40% in classrooms with high-income students, to more than 70% in classrooms with low-income students. Students in lower-income households were almost twice less likely to have teachers with previous experience teaching online and almost twice less likely to receive support from adults with homeschooling. Overall, our data suggest the effects of the pandemic were not equally distributed.

Why lockdown and distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to increase the social class achievement gap

Large socio-economic, geographic and demographic disparities exist in exposure to school closures

Remote learning slightly decreased student performance in an introductory undergraduate course on climate change

Introduction.

The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound effect on education worldwide 1 , 2 , with the aftermath of more than 180 countries experiencing school closures and more than 1.5 billion students left out of school 3 . Despite the efforts of governments and education institutions to provide alternative learning opportunities, the long periods that students had to spend away from the classroom have raised concerns about the potential long-term consequences on academic achievement, and the unequal effect that it will have on students from vulnerable and marginalized groups 4 , who had to navigate the challenges of at-home schooling while their families struggled with financial burdens 5 .

Empirical data about changes in students’ performance has been slow to emerge. One of the earliest pieces of evidence comes from a study in The Netherlands by Engzell, Frey, and Verhagen 6 . The authors analyzed changes in performance associated with school closures, using a uniquely rich dataset with more than 350,000 students in primary school. The data included biannual test scores collected at the middle and the end of each school year from 2017 and 2020. Critically, in 2020, the mid-year tests took place right before the first school closures in The Netherlands, providing a benchmark that authors could use to estimate learning losses. The authors identified an overall decrease in academic performance equivalent to 0.08 standard deviation units. Moreover, the effects on learning outcomes were not uniform, as students from less-educated households experienced losses 60% more pronounced than the general population.

These findings are critical since they provide evidence of the potential effects of the pandemic in a “best-case” scenario. More than 90% of students in The Netherlands had access to a computer at home, and more than 95% had access to the internet and a quiet place to study 7 . But even in this context of high levels of access to digital resources, equitable funding for elementary schools, and average-to-high performance prior to the pandemic, school closures have had tangible effects on learning outcomes, especially for children with disadvantaged backgrounds.

Similar studies comparing students’ performance before and after COVID have been conducted in other countries 8 , 9 . Most of them have found evidence of learning losses and slower rates of growth in academic abilities during the 2020–2021 school year 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , while others did not find any negative effects 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 .

Moreover, there is strong evidence suggesting that pre-existing inequalities in education have become more pronounced. Even before the pandemic, achievement gaps across socio-economic status (SES) were evident since kindergarten and persisted across education years 27 , 28 . During the pandemic, students from disadvantaged backgrounds suffered longer school closures 29 and had less access to computers and internet for schoolwork 7 , 30 , 31 , 32 . In addition, families facing financial struggles were in less favorable positions to dedicate resources and time to school activities at home 33 . As a result of these and other limitations, learning losses have been more severe for students from racial minorities 15 , 19 , 34 , with less educated parents 6 , 17 or those coming from low-income households 13 , 14 , 16 , 19 , 34 , 35 .

Recent attempts to synthesize the literature about learning losses 8 estimate that students have lost the equivalent of 35% of an academic year’s worth of learning. However, further data is necessary to assess the real extent to which the pandemic has impacted learning. On one hand, the data about changes in students’ performance is still very scarce, due to the limitations that remote learning imposed on school abilities to continue standardized assessments. Moreover, students from disadvantaged groups are more likely to be underrepresented 11 , 34 , 36 , both within countries and on a global scale 8 . Therefore, further evidence is needed to assess the real extent of the effects of the pandemic across different socio-economic conditions.

Teachers are a critical source of information that has not been considered enough. Teachers were at the front line of the education efforts during the pandemic and observed the impact on student learning and academic performance firsthand. While not free of biases, they are possibly the best-informed source of information about students’ abilities to benefit from these efforts, using their own previous experience as a comparison point. Critically, teachers’ observations are available across all school contexts and socio-economic strata. Therefore, they can provide insights into the effects of the pandemic that are representative of a wider variety of contexts than the ones included in a recent analysis of individual differences. Elementary school teachers more specifically, establish a unique relationship with their students, as they instruct them in multiple subjects, compared to higher education where students’ curriculum and interests are more heterogeneous, and students are often taught different subjects by different teachers. As a result, in the current context of data scarcity, elementary school teachers may be better prepared to aggregate individual student information into group-level estimates than can be accessed through survey methods.

Moreover, understanding teacher’s experiences throughout the pandemic is of critical importance for the future of education. Multiple studies have indicated that teachers have experienced higher levels of dissatisfaction and a lower sense of success during the pandemic 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , resulting in increased levels of attrition rates worldwide 42 .

The present study presents the results of a survey distributed to teachers in Canada and the US, right at the end of the 2020–2021 school year. Our survey obtained participants’ assessments about three overarching issues: (1) How did teachers experience the transition to emergency remote learning? (2) How were equitable opportunities to access education impacted by school closures? and (3) Have students experienced learning losses or gains during the pandemic? We also collected additional data about variables regarding the socio-economic context of students to explore the generalizability of our data to different school and classroom contexts.

Teachers’ experience transitioning from in-person to remote classes

Table 1 summarizes some of the variables that assessed teachers’ experience transitioning to remote learning. We expected that teachers’ previous experiences with online teaching and technology may have influenced how well they adapted to these changes. Overall, the observed distributions show that we recruited participants with different levels of previous preparation and training in both countries.

Notably, the proportion of teachers with no previous experience teaching online goes from 40% for high-SES students, to more than 75% for low SES students. This association was statistically significant $({\tau }_{c}=0.22{;p}\, < \,0.001)$ . Although weak, we also found significant interactions between student’s income level and the amount of training teachers received ( X 2 = 23.44; p = 0.024, df = 12, Cramer ′ sV = 0.09). We also observed higher levels of proficiency using digital technologies for educational purposes $({\tau }_{c}=0.08{;p}=0.007)$ for teacher of higher-income students. As we expected, switching to remote education was increasingly challenging for teachers with less experience teaching online $({\tau }_{c}=-0.18{;p}\, < \,0.001)$ , and those with poor digital skills $({\tau }_{c}=-0.11{;p}\, < \,0.001)$ .

Equitable opportunities to access education

Multiple items throughout the survey assessed to what extent learning opportunities were offered to students and their ability to benefit from them (Table 2 ). More than 96% of participants agreed that most to all students in their classroom had access to the resources needed for online classes. The distribution of responses was slightly different between countries ( X 2 = 17.82, p < 0.001, df = 3, Cramer ′ sV = 0.15). But overall, even for teachers that had low-income students, reporting that few or none of their students had access to technology was rare.

Despite having the means to access online education, more than 65% of participants indicated that attendance to class decreased during the 2020–2021 school year. Overall, there was no significant difference in teachers’ reports of attendance across countries ( X 2 = 2.97, p < 0.227, df = 2, Cramer ′ sV = 0.07). However, there was a difference in the association between attendance levels and students’ income across countries. For teachers in the US, lower levels of attendance were reported more frequently when students came from low-income households $({\tau }_{c}=-0.19{;p}\, < \,0.001)$ . For Canadian teachers, this association was not present $({\tau }_{c}=-0.03{;p}\, < \,0.517)$ .

Knowing the limitations of this survey in terms of providing individual data about attendance, we included one additional question to explore approximately what proportion of students were missing from the classroom. We asked respondents to break down their students into three different groups: students who attended regularly, students who attended irregularly and students who were completely absent from class throughout the whole year. According to teachers’ estimations, an average of 69.98% of students were present regularly in class, 21.24% came to class only irregularly and another 8.78% were completely absent during the whole school year. The proportion of students completely absent was consistently low for all SES levels $(F(4,611)=0.46,{p}=0.764,{\eta }^{2}=0.01)$ . In contrast, the number of students attending regularly increased linearly with SES levels $(F(4,611)=2.41,{p}=0.048,{\eta }^{2}=0.02{;linear\; trend}:t=2.12,{SE}=3.16,{p}=0.034)$ . Since these proportions are complementary, the proportion of students attending irregularly also decreased across SES levels $(F(4,611)=3.34,{p}=0.010,{\eta }^{2}=0.02{;linear\; trend}:t=-2.52,{SE}=2.28,{p}=0.012)$ .

During class, most participants indicated that they covered less content during online lessons than they do in a regular school year. Moreover, around 28% of participants considered that adult assistance was needed for students to complete schoolwork. Whether the support from a parent or caregiver was imperative or not, we also asked participants to estimate, approximately, what proportion of their students received help at home. More than 70% of participants perceived that most to all students in their class had the support of an adult to some degree. But more importantly, perceived levels of support were higher for teachers of students coming from higher-income households $({\tau }_{c}=-0.25{;p}\, < \,0.001)$ .

Changes in academic performance during the pandemic

Another important goal of our survey was to get teachers’ input on how different aspects of academic achievement may have been affected because of the interruption of in-person classes (Table 3 ). More than 50% of teachers indicated that children in their class performed worse than in previous years (Fig. 1a ). Moreover, teachers who reported having students from lower socio-economic status were more likely to report that performance was below the expectations for the grade (Fig. 1b ; ${\tau }_{c}=-0.25{;p}\, < \,0.001$ ). There were no differences across countries in these estimations of students’ average performance ( X 2 = 2.97, p < 0.227, df = 2, Cramer ′ sV = 0.07).

Teachers’ perceptions of the overall performance of students, compared to a regular school year ( a ) by country and ( b ) by classroom SES. Legend: - On average, students have performed below the expectations for their grade = On average, students have performed according to the expectations for their grade + On average, students have performed above the expectations for their grade.

Previous reports have suggested that learning losses during the pandemic have not been equally severe across different learning domains 11 . Motivated by those results, we asked participants to rate students’ performance in Math, Reading/Literature, and Spelling/Writing, separately. The distribution of responses for the three domains was slightly skewed, as most teachers reported learning losses to some degree for the three areas. We wanted to know if teachers’ perceptions of academic loss for specific domains varied depending on the subject they teach. Unfortunately, around 60% of our participants did not report that information. Moreover, out of the 40% who reported the subjects they were teaching, more than half of them taught multiple subjects that covered the three topics of interest. Nonetheless, we ran an exploratory analysis including just that 40% and we did not observe significant effects. (i.e. participants who teach math-related areas do not report better or worse learning losses in math when compared to other participants).

To complement these overall ratings, we requested more detailed information about the distribution of students in their classrooms, according to their performance level. Participants were asked to classify their students into three categories: students who performed below the expectations for their grade, students who performed according to the expectations for their grade, and students who performed above the expectations for their grade. Even though our data cannot inform about individual differences in performance, with this question we expected to obtain an estimate of the proportion of students who experienced the learning losses reported in the previous questions.

Comparing the data across the three domains did not yield significant differences in the severity of learning losses that teachers report for Math, Reading, or Spelling (Fig. 2 ). However, we did find differences across countries in the proportions of low, average, or high-performance students that teachers reported across all domains. Canadian teachers reported lower percentages than their US counterparts of students performing below standards during the 2020–21 school year $(F(1,904)=7.23,{p}=0.007,{\eta }^{2}=0.01)$ . They also reported higher proportions of students performing above standards for their grades despite the pandemic $(F(1,905)=37.54,{p}\, < \,0.001,{\eta }^{2}=0.03)$ . In summary, even though teachers of both countries reported an overall decrease in students’ performance, teachers from the US report having a higher percentage of students experiencing these losses.

Average performance of students compared to a regular school year in ( a ) Math, ( b ) Reading/Literature, and ( c ) Spelling/Writing. Legend: -- Much worse- Somewhat worse = About the same + Somewhat better + + Much better.

Participants were also asked to estimate whether the gap between the students performing at the higher level, and those performing at the lowest level had increased, decreased, or stayed the same, compared to a typical school year. This question was designed to elicit teachers’ views of individual differences between students in their classrooms. About 58% of teachers indicated that differences between students had widened during the 2020–2021 school year, in contrast to around 32% who didn’t perceive any changes and another 10% who indicated that this gap decreased. Finally, we included one general question in the survey to ask teachers if they believed that the pandemic would have long lasting effects on students and, if so, whether these effects would have a positive or negative outcome. A large proportion of the participants expressed that the changes occurring during the pandemic would most likely have a negative impact on students’ learning in the long run.

We distributed a survey to primary school teachers in the US and Canada at the end of the 2020–2021 school year. Our survey was able to reach teachers from different levels of SES, who were affected by school closure at varying degrees. Their responses provided relevant insights into how education took place during the COVID-19 health crisis, especially during the 2020–2021 school year, the first to fully occur within the pandemic.

Results from our survey suggest that a large proportion of students in both countries had access to the digital resources required to access these online alternatives (such as computers, internet, etc.). This was especially true for students from advantaged homes, but even in the lower SES levels, more than 90% of students had access to digital resources. This is not surprising, considering recent statistics showing that around 93% and 88% of students in Canada and the US, respectively, have access to a computer at home and more than 95% have access to the internet in both countries 7 , 32 .

However, the availability of digital resources is necessary but not sufficient to guarantee that students have access to educational opportunities. For example, our data indicates that the amount of instruction time decreased substantially, compared to a regular school year. Instruction time requirements for primary school in both Canada 43 and the US 44 vary across states, but the average is close to 30 h per week. The average number of hours of remote instruction reported by our participants fell below the 20 h, which represents less than two thirds of these typical requirements. Consistently, most participants reported not being able to deliver all the content they typically taught during a regular school year. In addition, most participants indicated that attendance to class was lower than in a traditional year. Was this trend due to just a few, or to many students consistently missing class? On average, our respondents report that approximately 3 in every 10 students in their class were attending inconsistently or completely absent. Although small, the reported proportions of students who were completely absent from class are of critical importance, since they represent students who were not able to benefit from education opportunities at all during the last school year.

Overall, nearly 56% of our participants agreed that students performed below the expectations for their grades during the 2020–2021 school year. These reports are converging with previous studies using standardized tests to compare students’ academic achievement before and during the pandemic (Engzell et al., 2020; Kuhfeld et al., 2020). Unlike previous studies, teachers’ rates of academic performance obtained during our survey do not suggest that the drop in math performance was more pronounced than in other domains (i.e., reading). It is possible that differences between learning losses experienced across domains exist in our student population, as suggested by studies analyzing individual data on standardized tests. However, those differences may not be large enough to be captured by the limited response options presented in our survey. It is also possible that presenting this question in a grid format may have increased the probability of straight-lining, or the tendency in which participants select the same answer choice to all items on the question.

More importantly, teachers’ rates of academic performance varied drastically according to the income-level of their students, and more than half of our participants agreed that differences between low and high performing students became more pronounced during the 2020–2021 school year. This learning gap between low and high performing students is fundamentally different from the overall performance trend. Assuming that teachers’ ratings are an accurate depiction of how actual performance was impacted by the school closures, the questions about overall performance should reflect perceived changes on the mean of the distribution, whereas the questions about the learning gap should reflect perceived changes on the difference between the lower and the upper tail of the distribution within their classrooms.

Like previous studies in the literature, our findings suggest that the pandemic has emphasized individual differences between students of different income levels, that are otherwise attenuated during in-person instruction. Figure 3 highlights the most noticeable differences between the lower and the top 20% of the SES distribution. The consistent pattern of interaction between teachers’ reports of the effects of the pandemic and their students’ socio-economic background suggests that students from low- and high-income households may have experienced school closures in very different ways.

We created two groups to represent the extremes of the SES distribution. To make the groups comparable in terms of size, the lower SES group included participants who reported that their students come from predominantly Low-Income households ( n = 168), whereas the higher SES group included participants whose students predominantly come from High-Income households ( n = 53), or a mix of Middle and High-Income ( n = 119). Since our perceived SES measure is on a discrete scale, selecting exactly the top and bottom 20% is not possible. Instead, the lower and higher income groups represent 18.44% and 18.88% of the distribution.

First, our data suggest that teachers from classrooms with higher income levels may have been more prepared for the transition to remote alternatives, as they had more relevant experience with online instruction before the pandemic and they had better self-ratings of digital skills than teachers from lower SES classrooms. For example, 7 out of every 10 teachers of students in the lower 20% of the SES were teaching online for the first time during the pandemic, versus only 4 out of every 10 in the top 20% SES.

During the school closures, teachers from higher SES classrooms were also less likely to report a drop in overall attendance levels to online lessons, compared to a regular school year, and had higher proportions of students who consistently attended class. Moreover, they observed students receiving support from adults at home more frequently. This was one of the most striking contrasts observed in our data, which became more evident when comparing the two extremes of the distribution. Taken together, these results suggest that students in higher income levels may have been in a better position to benefit from the remote alternatives offered during the pandemic. Consistent with this prediction, teachers from higher income classrooms were also less likely to report learning losses during the pandemic.

These results have critical implications for our understanding of the long-term effect of the pandemic. Household income was already an important predictor of future academic achievement before the pandemic. With the closure of schools as a measure to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus, children from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds who were already in a vulnerable position may find themselves falling further behind their peers. As a result, they may be more likely to experience dropout in the future and less likely to pursue higher levels of education, which may reinforce the already existing income inequalities into future generations.

There are limitations to our results due to the observational nature of the data. It is possible that some of the associations observed are the results of biases in teachers’ perceptions. In addition, it is important to bear in mind that teacher reports offer information that occurs at the classroom level and therefore cannot account for effects at the individual level.

Despite these limitations, teachers can provide insights into the effects that the pandemic has had on students that is unique and highly valuable. Teachers have been active observers of students’ performance before, during, and after the pandemic. They receive a constant stream of data from students and therefore may perceive trends that standardized tests taken at a single time point may not capture.

In addition, teachers can provide information that is representative of a wide range of socio-economic and classroom contexts, something that has been a limitation of previous analyses of individual data. Our survey has its own limitations when describing the effects of SES on learning during the pandemic. For instance, we cannot guarantee that the SES levels reported by teachers in the US will correspond perfectly with the same levels in Canada. In other words, what teachers consider low SES in one country may be considered middle SES in the other. But even if the levels do not overlap perfectly, what seems to be consistent across our data is that students in lower levels struggled more during the pandemic and that trend remains when analyses are conducted on each country separately.

Critically, the relevance of teacher surveys is not only limited to their role as informants of students’ achievement. Teachers have a critical role in carrying forward education efforts and understanding how they experienced the recent crisis is by itself a critical question that current research should address. The stress associated with abrupt changes in the work environment, combined with the high demands and responsibility levels puts teachers at risk of experiencing work-related burnout. In fact, previous studies have found that, during 2020, teachers were more likely to consider leaving the classroom before retirement age 39 , 45 , 46 , 47 , and at least 23% considered retiring specifically due to the pandemic 48 , which has aggravated the already existing global crisis of teacher shortages 42 . In our survey, as expected, the frequency of teachers considering leaving their profession was higher for those with more years of experience. However, even in the group of less experienced teachers, around 1 in every 4 considered retiring during the pandemic. Teachers are expected to continue to have a critical role as the pandemic continues to unfold and in future efforts to mitigate the learning losses experienced by students during this period. It is evident from these results that understanding teachers’ experiences and providing them with the necessary resources and support will be critical for the success of these efforts.

In summary, our results provide an insight into how teachers from these countries experienced remote education, and their observations about consequences for students’ academic achievement, measured right at the end of the first school year to fully occur amidst the pandemic. Our sample was diverse in terms of the geographical distribution of responses and the socio-economic background of the students. Nevertheless, our results may be specific to the higher-level socio-economic characteristics of these countries and may not be generalizable to different contexts. Our results suggest that even in the presence of widespread access to digital learning tools, consistent attendance to class and complete delivery of the curriculum could not be guaranteed. Most teachers reported observing a decline in students’ academic performance, and a growth in the gaps between low and high performing students. More importantly, our data suggest that the effects of the pandemic were not equally distributed. Students from lower SES levels had teachers who were less prepared for the transition to online activities and received less support from adults during homeschooling. Consistently, teachers from lower SES classrooms also reported drops in performance more frequently than those from the higher SES levels.

Even though the group estimations that teachers provide at the classroom level are not enough to suggest causal relationships between the variables we studied and individual differences in academic achievement, teachers contribute valuable information, based on their constant interaction with students. Their observations provide a unique perspective on the effects of the pandemic that is relevant to inform policy decisions and future research.

Participants

Teachers from public elementary schools were recruited through the Qualtrics Online Sample panel. We aimed at a sample size of 900 participants, 450 from Canada and 450 from the US. Our sample size was constrained by the availability of participants from the Qualtrics panel that fit into our inclusion criteria. We required participants to be elementary school teachers (grades 1 to 6), fluent in English, living in Canada or the US, who were actively teaching during the 2020–2021 school year. We surveyed 918 participants between June 16th and June 28th, 2021. Seven participants were removed for having a large number of missing responses. The final sample included 911 participants, 453 from Canada and 458 from the US (Fig. 4 ). The complete dataset can be accessed here: https://osf.io/3dsef .

Distribution of responses collected across Canada and the US 49 The circle size represents the amount of participants recruited, transformed to log scale.

Our sample was diverse in terms of the professional background of participants and the socioeconomic characteristics of their students (see Table 4 ). We did not consider participants’ socioeconomic status (SES) when determining inclusion. In fact, we were not able to select participants across specific SES levels since the Qualtrics Online Sample of teachers was already limited. Rather, we recruited all potential participants and subsequently described the income level of the students they teach, as reported by the participants themselves.

There were small differences between participants of both countries. For example, teachers from the US were on average more experienced than their Canadian counterparts ( X Can = 10.05 years, X USA = 11.82 years; t (822.63) = −2.14, p = 0.033, d = 0.14) and reported having students from lower-income households to a greater extent ( X 2 = 71.44, p = 0.000, df = 4, Cramer ′ sV = 0.20).

More than 90% of teachers in our sample experienced school closures during the pandemic, ranging from a few days to the whole year (Table 5 ). Partial closures were, on average, larger in Canada compared to the US ( t (409.40) = 3.32, p = 0.001, d = 0.33). During remote instruction, participants reported spending around 18.87 h of class time per week. Furthermore, most participants received classwork from students on a weekly or daily basis and provided feedback with similar frequency. These survey items offered an estimate of the amount of information that participants received from students, which will serve as a basis for their judgments about academic performance.

Since most of the observed discrepancies between countries corresponded to small effect sizes, we considered both groups of participants to be comparable. Therefore, we report here the results corresponding to the whole sample.

The study was approved by the Non-medical Research Ethics Board of the University of Western Ontario. We administered the survey through the Qualtrics online platform. All the participants on the Qualtrics panel who potentially met our inclusion criteria received an email with a link to the survey and the estimated time commitment. Participants who accessed the link were presented with the letter of information (LOI) before starting the survey. Since the survey was administered online, participants could not provide written consent. Instead, they indicated agreement to participate by ticking a checkbox at the end of the LOI. The survey was presented only to those participants who provided this type of consent.

We asked participants to complete the survey in a single session, which should have taken approximately 10 min. To minimize the risk of missing data, we required responses for most survey items. However, all the questions with response requirements included an ‘I prefer not to answer’ option that participants could use if they didn’t feel comfortable disclosing the required information. The complete survey is available here: https://osf.io/bx63k/ .

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/3dsef .

UNESCO. Education: From disruption to recovery. https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse#schoolclosures (2020).

UNICEF. COVID-19 and School Closures: One Year of Education Disruption . (2021).

United Nations. Policy Brief: Education during COVID-19 and beyond. Policy Brief (2020).

World Bank Group. The COVID-19 pandemic: shocks to education and policy responses. Education vol. 29 (2020).

Bansak, C. & Starr, M. Covid-19 shocks to education supply: how 200,000 U.S. households dealt with the sudden shift to distance learning. Rev. Econ. House. 19 , 63–90 (2021).

Article Google Scholar

Engzell, P., Frey, A. & Verhagen, M. D. Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 118 , e2022376118 (2021).

Article CAS PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

OECD. Learning remotely when schools close: How well are students and schools prepared? Insights from PISA . (2020).

Betthäuser, B. A., Bach-Mortensen, A. M. & Engzell, P. A systematic review and meta-analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning . (2022).

Moscoviz, L. & Evans, D. K. Learning loss and student dropouts during the COVID-19 Pandemic: a review of the evidence two years after schools shut down abstract. Center for Global Development www.cgdev.org (2022).

Tomasik, M. J., Helbling, L. A. & Moser, U. Educational gains of in-person vs. distance learning in primary and secondary schools: a natural experiment during the COVID-19 pandemic school closures in Switzerland. Int. J. Psychol. 56 , 566–576 (2021).

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Kuhfeld, M., Tarasawa, B., Johnson, A., Ruzek, E. & Lewis, K. Learning during COVID-19: initial findings on students’ reading and math achievement and growth. Collaborative for student growth (2020).

Domingue, B. W., Hough, H. J., Lang, D., Yeatman, J. & Christian, M. S. Changing patterns of growth in oral reading fluency during the COVID-19 pandemic . (2021).

Maldonado, J. E. & de Witte, K. The effect of school closures on standardised student test outcomes. Br. Educ. Res. J. (2021) https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3754 .

Domingue, B. W. et al. The effect of COVID on oral reading fluency during the 2020–2021 academic year. AERA Open 8 , 233285842211202 (2022).

Pier, L., Hough, H. J., Christian, M. & Bookman, N. COVID-19 and the Educational Equity Crisis | Policy Analysis for California Education . https://edpolicyinca.org/newsroom/covid-19-and-educational-equity-crisis (2021).

Dorn, E., Hancock, B., Sarakatsannis, J. & Viruleg, E. COVID-19 and learning loss-disparities grow and students need help . (2020).

Contini, D., di Tommaso, M. L., Muratori, C., Piazzalunga, D. & Schiavon, L. The COVID-19 pandemic and school closure: learning loss in mathematics in primary education . (2021).

Schult, J., Mahler, N., Fauth, B. & Lindner, M. A. School Effectiveness and School Improvement Did students learn less during the COVID-19 pandemic? Reading and mathematics competencies before and after the first pandemic wave. (2022) https://doi.org/10.1080/09243453.2022.2061014 .

Renaissance Learning. How kids are performing tracking the impact of COVID-19 on reading and mathematics achievement . www.renaissance.com (2020).

Ardington, C., Wills, G. & Kotze, J. COVID-19 learning losses: early grade reading in South Africa. Int J. Educ. Dev. 86 , 102480 (2021).

Hevia, F. J., Vergara-Lope, S., Velásquez-Durán, A. & Calderón, D. Estimation of the fundamental learning loss and learning poverty related to COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. Int J. Educ. Dev. 88 , 102515 (2022).

Gambi, L. & De Witte, K. The resiliency of school outcomes after the COVID-19 pandemic. Standardised test scores and inequality one year after long term school closures. FEB Research Report Department of Economics (2021).

Spitzer, M. W. H. & Musslick, S. Academic performance of K-12 students in an online-learning environment for mathematics increased during the shutdown of schools in wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. PLoS One 16 , e0255629 (2021).

Gore, J., Fray, L., Miller, A., Harris, J. & Taggart, W. The impact of COVID-19 on student learning in New South Wales primary schools: an empirical study. Aust. Educ. Res 48 , 605–637 (2021).

Article PubMed PubMed Central Google Scholar

Hallin, A. E., Danielsson, H., Nordström, T. & Fälth, L. No learning loss in Sweden during the pandemic: evidence from primary school reading assessments. Int J. Educ. Res 114 , 102011 (2022).

UNESCO Institute of Statistics. COVID-19 in Sub-Saharan Africa: monitoring impacts on learning outcomes . http://www.unesco.org/open-access/terms-use-ccbysa-en (2022).

Kuhfeld, M., Condron, D. J. & Downey, D. B. When does inequality grow? A seasonal analysis of racial/ethnic disparities in learning from kindergarten through eighth grade. Educ. Res. 50 , 225–238 (2021).

García, E. & Weiss, E. Education inequalities at the school starting gate. Gaps, trends, and strategies to address them . (2017).

Parolin, Z. & Lee, E. K. Large socio-economic, geographic and demographic disparities exist in exposure to school closures. Nat. Hum. Behav. 2021 5:4 5 , 522–528 (2021).

OECD. Students access to a computer at home. https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/en/data-insights/student-access-to-a-computer-at-home (2020).

Frenette, M., Frank, K. & Deng, Z. School Closures and the Online Preparedness of Children during the COVID-19 Pandemic . www.statcan.gc.ca (2020).

Irwin, V. et al. Report on the Condition of Education. 2021 . (2021).

Pensiero, N., Kelly, T. & Bokhove, C. Learning inequalities during the Covid-19 pandemic: how families cope with home-schooling. University of Southampton research report . (2020) https://doi.org/10.5258/SOTON/P0025 .

Lewis, K. & Kuhfeld, M. Learning during COVID-19 : An update on student achievement and growth at the start of the 2021–22 school year . (2021).

Haelermans, C. et al. A full year COVID-19 crisis with interrupted learning and two school closures: the effects on learning growth and inequality in primary education. ROA Research Memorandum (2021) https://doi.org/10.26481/UMAROR.2021009 .

Lewis, K., Kuhfeld, M., Ruzek, E. & McEachin, A. Learning during COVID-19: Reading and Math achievement in the 2020–21 school year . https://content.acsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Learning-During-COVID-19-Reading-and-Math-NWEA-Brief.pdf (2021).

Silva, R. R. V. et al. COVID-19 pandemic: dissatisfaction with work among teachers in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Cien Saude Colet. 26 , 6117–6128 (2021).

Alves, R., Lopes, T. & Precioso, J. Teachers’ well-being in times of Covid-19 pandemic: factors that explain professional well-being. IJERI: Int. J. Educ. Res. Innov. 203–217 (2020) https://doi.org/10.46661/ijeri.5120 .

Gillani, A. et al. Teachers’ dissatisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic: factors contributing to a desire to leave the profession. (2022) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.940718 .

Aperribai, L., Cortabarria, L., Aguirre, T., Verche, E. & Borges, Á. Teacher’s physical activity and mental health during lockdown due to the COVID-2019 pandemic. Front Psychol. 11 , 2673 (2020).

Kraft, M. A., Simon, N. S. & Lyon, M. A. Sustaining a sense of success: the protective role of teacher working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. J. Res Educ. Eff. 14 , 727–769 (2021).

Google Scholar

UNESCO. Transforming education from within. (2022).

Statistics Canada. Education Indicators in Canada: An International Perspective 2017 . https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-604-x/2017001/ch/chd-eng.htm (2017).

National Center for Education Statistics. State Education Practices (SEP) . (2020).

Bacher-Hicks, A., Chi, O. L. & Orellana, A. Two years later: how COVID-19 has shaped the teacher workforce. Educational Researcher (2023) https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X231153659 .

Hoang, A.-D. Pandemic and teacher retention: empirical evidence from expat teachers in Southeast Asia during COVID-19. Int. J. Sociol. Soc. Policy 40 , 1141–1166 (2020).

Gunn, T. M., McRae, P. A. & Edge-Partington, M. Factors that influence beginning teacher retention during the COVID-19 pandemic: findings from one Canadian province. Int. J. Educ. Res. Open 4 , 100233 (2023).

Zamarro, G. & Camp, A. Understanding how COVID-19 has Changed Teachers ’ Chances of Remaining in the Classroom Research Brief Understanding how COVID- 19 has Changed Teachers ’ Chances of Remaining in the Classroom . (2021).

Plotly Technologies Inc. Collaborative data science. Montréal, QC . https://plot.ly . (2015)

Download references

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the educators who offered their valuable time to respond to our survey. We would also like to thank Bea Goffin for assistance with research ethics and project management. This project was supported by a Catalyst Grant from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR, Grant Reference CF-0213) to CLO and DA. Danial Ansari is supported by the Jacobs Foundation through the CERES Network.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

Aymee Alvarez-Rivero & Daniel Ansari

Department of Psychological Science, University of California -Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

Candice Odgers

Social Science Research Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

Study conception and design by all authors. Initial survey draft by A.A.R, but all authors reviewed and provided feedback that was incorporated to the final version. Data analysis and initial draft of the manuscript by A.A.R but all authors contributed and approved the final version.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aymee Alvarez-Rivero .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Reporting summary, rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Alvarez-Rivero, A., Odgers, C. & Ansari, D. Elementary school teachers’ perspectives about learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. npj Sci. Learn. 8 , 40 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-023-00191-w

Download citation

Received : 01 December 2022

Accepted : 04 September 2023

Published : 18 September 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-023-00191-w

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Quick links

Explore articles by subject
Guide to authors
Editorial policies

Our Mission

Illustration concept of people solving research problems and puzzles

The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2021

From reframing our notion of “good” schools to mining the magic of expert teachers, here’s a curated list of must-read research from 2021.

It was a year of unprecedented hardship for teachers and school leaders. We pored through hundreds of studies to see if we could follow the trail of exactly what happened: The research revealed a complex portrait of a grueling year during which persistent issues of burnout and mental and physical health impacted millions of educators. Meanwhile, many of the old debates continued: Does paper beat digital? Is project-based learning as effective as direct instruction? How do you define what a “good” school is?

Other studies grabbed our attention, and in a few cases, made headlines. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Columbia University turned artificial intelligence loose on some 1,130 award-winning children’s books in search of invisible patterns of bias. (Spoiler alert: They found some.) Another study revealed why many parents are reluctant to support social and emotional learning in schools—and provided hints about how educators can flip the script.

1. What Parents Fear About SEL (and How to Change Their Minds)

When researchers at the Fordham Institute asked parents to rank phrases associated with social and emotional learning , nothing seemed to add up. The term “social-emotional learning” was very unpopular; parents wanted to steer their kids clear of it. But when the researchers added a simple clause, forming a new phrase—”social-emotional & academic learning”—the program shot all the way up to No. 2 in the rankings.

What gives?

Parents were picking up subtle cues in the list of SEL-related terms that irked or worried them, the researchers suggest. Phrases like “soft skills” and “growth mindset” felt “nebulous” and devoid of academic content. For some, the language felt suspiciously like “code for liberal indoctrination.”

But the study suggests that parents might need the simplest of reassurances to break through the political noise. Removing the jargon, focusing on productive phrases like “life skills,” and relentlessly connecting SEL to academic progress puts parents at ease—and seems to save social and emotional learning in the process.

2. The Secret Management Techniques of Expert Teachers

In the hands of experienced teachers, classroom management can seem almost invisible: Subtle techniques are quietly at work behind the scenes, with students falling into orderly routines and engaging in rigorous academic tasks almost as if by magic.

That’s no accident, according to new research . While outbursts are inevitable in school settings, expert teachers seed their classrooms with proactive, relationship-building strategies that often prevent misbehavior before it erupts. They also approach discipline more holistically than their less-experienced counterparts, consistently reframing misbehavior in the broader context of how lessons can be more engaging, or how clearly they communicate expectations.

Focusing on the underlying dynamics of classroom behavior—and not on surface-level disruptions—means that expert teachers often look the other way at all the right times, too. Rather than rise to the bait of a minor breach in etiquette, a common mistake of new teachers, they tend to play the long game, asking questions about the origins of misbehavior, deftly navigating the terrain between discipline and student autonomy, and opting to confront misconduct privately when possible.

3. The Surprising Power of Pretesting

Asking students to take a practice test before they’ve even encountered the material may seem like a waste of time—after all, they’d just be guessing.

But new research concludes that the approach, called pretesting, is actually more effective than other typical study strategies. Surprisingly, pretesting even beat out taking practice tests after learning the material, a proven strategy endorsed by cognitive scientists and educators alike. In the study, students who took a practice test before learning the material outperformed their peers who studied more traditionally by 49 percent on a follow-up test, while outperforming students who took practice tests after studying the material by 27 percent.

The researchers hypothesize that the “generation of errors” was a key to the strategy’s success, spurring student curiosity and priming them to “search for the correct answers” when they finally explored the new material—and adding grist to a 2018 study that found that making educated guesses helped students connect background knowledge to new material.

Learning is more durable when students do the hard work of correcting misconceptions, the research suggests, reminding us yet again that being wrong is an important milestone on the road to being right.

4. Confronting an Old Myth About Immigrant Students

Immigrant students are sometimes portrayed as a costly expense to the education system, but new research is systematically dismantling that myth.

In a 2021 study , researchers analyzed over 1.3 million academic and birth records for students in Florida communities, and concluded that the presence of immigrant students actually has “a positive effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born students,” raising test scores as the size of the immigrant school population increases. The benefits were especially powerful for low-income students.

While immigrants initially “face challenges in assimilation that may require additional school resources,” the researchers concluded, hard work and resilience may allow them to excel and thus “positively affect exposed U.S.-born students’ attitudes and behavior.” But according to teacher Larry Ferlazzo, the improvements might stem from the fact that having English language learners in classes improves pedagogy , pushing teachers to consider “issues like prior knowledge, scaffolding, and maximizing accessibility.”

5. A Fuller Picture of What a ‘Good’ School Is

It’s time to rethink our definition of what a “good school” is, researchers assert in a study published in late 2020.⁣ That’s because typical measures of school quality like test scores often provide an incomplete and misleading picture, the researchers found.

The study looked at over 150,000 ninth-grade students who attended Chicago public schools and concluded that emphasizing the social and emotional dimensions of learning—relationship-building, a sense of belonging, and resilience, for example—improves high school graduation and college matriculation rates for both high- and low-income students, beating out schools that focus primarily on improving test scores.⁣

“Schools that promote socio-emotional development actually have a really big positive impact on kids,” said lead researcher C. Kirabo Jackson in an interview with Edutopia . “And these impacts are particularly large for vulnerable student populations who don’t tend to do very well in the education system.”

The findings reinforce the importance of a holistic approach to measuring student progress, and are a reminder that schools—and teachers—can influence students in ways that are difficult to measure, and may only materialize well into the future.⁣

6. Teaching Is Learning

One of the best ways to learn a concept is to teach it to someone else. But do you actually have to step into the shoes of a teacher, or does the mere expectation of teaching do the trick?

In a 2021 study , researchers split students into two groups and gave them each a science passage about the Doppler effect—a phenomenon associated with sound and light waves that explains the gradual change in tone and pitch as a car races off into the distance, for example. One group studied the text as preparation for a test; the other was told that they’d be teaching the material to another student.

The researchers never carried out the second half of the activity—students read the passages but never taught the lesson. All of the participants were then tested on their factual recall of the Doppler effect, and their ability to draw deeper conclusions from the reading.

The upshot? Students who prepared to teach outperformed their counterparts in both duration and depth of learning, scoring 9 percent higher on factual recall a week after the lessons concluded, and 24 percent higher on their ability to make inferences. The research suggests that asking students to prepare to teach something—or encouraging them to think “could I teach this to someone else?”—can significantly alter their learning trajectories.

7. A Disturbing Strain of Bias in Kids’ Books

Some of the most popular and well-regarded children’s books—Caldecott and Newbery honorees among them—persistently depict Black, Asian, and Hispanic characters with lighter skin, according to new research .

Using artificial intelligence, researchers combed through 1,130 children’s books written in the last century, comparing two sets of diverse children’s books—one a collection of popular books that garnered major literary awards, the other favored by identity-based awards. The software analyzed data on skin tone, race, age, and gender.

Among the findings: While more characters with darker skin color begin to appear over time, the most popular books—those most frequently checked out of libraries and lining classroom bookshelves—continue to depict people of color in lighter skin tones. More insidiously, when adult characters are “moral or upstanding,” their skin color tends to appear lighter, the study’s lead author, Anjali Aduki, told The 74 , with some books converting “Martin Luther King Jr.’s chocolate complexion to a light brown or beige.” Female characters, meanwhile, are often seen but not heard.

Cultural representations are a reflection of our values, the researchers conclude: “Inequality in representation, therefore, constitutes an explicit statement of inequality of value.”

8. The Never-Ending ‘Paper Versus Digital’ War

The argument goes like this: Digital screens turn reading into a cold and impersonal task; they’re good for information foraging, and not much more. “Real” books, meanwhile, have a heft and “tactility” that make them intimate, enchanting—and irreplaceable.

But researchers have often found weak or equivocal evidence for the superiority of reading on paper. While a recent study concluded that paper books yielded better comprehension than e-books when many of the digital tools had been removed, the effect sizes were small. A 2021 meta-analysis further muddies the water: When digital and paper books are “mostly similar,” kids comprehend the print version more readily—but when enhancements like motion and sound “target the story content,” e-books generally have the edge.

Nostalgia is a force that every new technology must eventually confront. There’s plenty of evidence that writing with pen and paper encodes learning more deeply than typing. But new digital book formats come preloaded with powerful tools that allow readers to annotate, look up words, answer embedded questions, and share their thinking with other readers.

We may not be ready to admit it, but these are precisely the kinds of activities that drive deeper engagement, enhance comprehension, and leave us with a lasting memory of what we’ve read. The future of e-reading, despite the naysayers, remains promising.

9. New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL

Many classrooms today still look like they did 100 years ago, when students were preparing for factory jobs. But the world’s moved on: Modern careers demand a more sophisticated set of skills—collaboration, advanced problem-solving, and creativity, for example—and those can be difficult to teach in classrooms that rarely give students the time and space to develop those competencies.

Project-based learning (PBL) would seem like an ideal solution. But critics say PBL places too much responsibility on novice learners, ignoring the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction and ultimately undermining subject fluency. Advocates counter that student-centered learning and direct instruction can and should coexist in classrooms.

Now two new large-scale studies —encompassing over 6,000 students in 114 diverse schools across the nation—provide evidence that a well-structured, project-based approach boosts learning for a wide range of students.

In the studies, which were funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia , elementary and high school students engaged in challenging projects that had them designing water systems for local farms, or creating toys using simple household objects to learn about gravity, friction, and force. Subsequent testing revealed notable learning gains—well above those experienced by students in traditional classrooms—and those gains seemed to raise all boats, persisting across socioeconomic class, race, and reading levels.

10. Tracking a Tumultuous Year for Teachers

The Covid-19 pandemic cast a long shadow over the lives of educators in 2021, according to a year’s worth of research.

The average teacher’s workload suddenly “spiked last spring,” wrote the Center for Reinventing Public Education in its January 2021 report, and then—in defiance of the laws of motion—simply never let up. By the fall, a RAND study recorded an astonishing shift in work habits: 24 percent of teachers reported that they were working 56 hours or more per week, compared to 5 percent pre-pandemic.

The vaccine was the promised land, but when it arrived nothing seemed to change. In an April 2021 survey conducted four months after the first vaccine was administered in New York City, 92 percent of teachers said their jobs were more stressful than prior to the pandemic, up from 81 percent in an earlier survey.

It wasn’t just the length of the work days; a close look at the research reveals that the school system’s failure to adjust expectations was ruinous. It seemed to start with the obligations of hybrid teaching, which surfaced in Edutopia ’s coverage of overseas school reopenings. In June 2020, well before many U.S. schools reopened, we reported that hybrid teaching was an emerging problem internationally, and warned that if the “model is to work well for any period of time,” schools must “recognize and seek to reduce the workload for teachers.” Almost eight months later, a 2021 RAND study identified hybrid teaching as a primary source of teacher stress in the U.S., easily outpacing factors like the health of a high-risk loved one.

New and ever-increasing demands for tech solutions put teachers on a knife’s edge. In several important 2021 studies, researchers concluded that teachers were being pushed to adopt new technology without the “resources and equipment necessary for its correct didactic use.” Consequently, they were spending more than 20 hours a week adapting lessons for online use, and experiencing an unprecedented erosion of the boundaries between their work and home lives, leading to an unsustainable “always on” mentality. When it seemed like nothing more could be piled on—when all of the lights were blinking red—the federal government restarted standardized testing .

Change will be hard; many of the pathologies that exist in the system now predate the pandemic. But creating strict school policies that separate work from rest, eliminating the adoption of new tech tools without proper supports, distributing surveys regularly to gauge teacher well-being, and above all listening to educators to identify and confront emerging problems might be a good place to start, if the research can be believed.

Reference Manager
Simple TEXT file

People also looked at

Original research article, impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on student learning and opportunity gaps across the 2020–2021 school year: a national survey of teachers.

1 School of Education, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, United States
2 Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, United States
3 School of Education, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States
4 Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, United States

Although many school districts made efforts to provide instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic (including in-person, remote, and blended/hybrid options the length of instruction time and delivery models have varied from district to district. This disruption in education has been projected to result in a significant learning loss, which may be particularly profound for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, leading to widening opportunity gaps. However, there is limited empirical data that can provide important contextual background for understanding the impact of the pandemic on student learning. Therefore, we conducted a national survey with a random sample of 582 elementary school teachers to understand the instructional changes that occurred, the amount of academic content instruction provided to students, and teachers perceptions of the learning supports needed and provided to students during the 2020–2021 school year. Results indicated that most teachers relied on alternative forms of instruction and experienced changes in delivery models but reported low instructional effectiveness. Compared to typical years, teachers reported significant decreases in curriculum coverage; the number of students who received needed interventions, and students who were ready to transition to the next grade level during the 2020–2021 school year. Teachers also reported greater impacts on instruction for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Follow-up analyses using prior school achievement data corroborated the findings that higher school achievement was associated with smaller impacts on student learning and delivery of instruction.

Introduction

Many school districts were forced to temporarily close schools in spring 2020 during the COVID-19 crisis. This marked one of the largest disruptions to education in history, forcing more than 1.6 billion children out of school in the United States and affecting 95% of school-aged children worldwide ( United Nations, 2020 ; Kaffenberger, 2021 ). Although many schools attempted to provide remote instruction during the spring of 2020, estimates suggest that between 7.2 and 11.6 million K-5 students also may not have received remote instruction ( Goodrich et al., 2022 ).

In the 2020–2021 school year, school districts adapted to the pandemic by developing a variety of instructional models to reach students, including remote learning, blended/hybrid learning, and in-person learning, with some school districts implementing multiple models for various lengths of time. Despite the strong efforts of schools and teachers, these delivery models may not have provided the same quality of education compared to instruction prior to the pandemic for several reasons. Schools that returned to in-person learning faced frequent student absences and staff shortages due to the COVID related quarantines. For schools that opted to provide alternate forms of learning, many teachers, parents, and students had to make quick transitions without strong supports in place (e.g., technology support, student engagement strategies; Stanistreet et al., 2020 ).

To estimate the potential impact of the COVID-19 school closures on student learning (e.g., Dorn et al., 2020 ; Kuhfeld et al., 2020 ; Kaffenberger, 2021 ), some researchers have projected learning losses based on estimates from typical school closures, such as summer breaks. With some variability in the estimates of the summer learning loss (0.001 to 0.01 SD learning loss per day out of school), prior research indicated student achievement slows down or even declines over the summer breaks (e.g., von Hippel et al., 2018 ; Kuhfeld, 2019 ). Based on these estimates, Kuhfeld et al. (2020) projected that students who did not have access to remote instruction (3 months) in spring 2020 would begin fall 2020 with only 37% to 68% of typical learning gains in reading and mathematics, and some students may be up to one year behind in mathematics. Even students who received remote instruction in spring 2020 were projected to begin fall 2020 with 60% to 87% of their typical learning gains.

However, these numbers may underestimate the problem to some degree. The assumption is that learning losses could be similar to losses experienced during other breaks from school. However, instructional challenges related to COVID-19 are also likely to have resulted in less content coverage when school has been in session, compounding the losses. In addition, differential access to technology and remote instruction during COVID-19 school closures are projected to exacerbate the impacts of the pandemic for some populations, widening SES-based opportunity gaps. The learning losses are expected to be greatest among low-income students because students from high SES schools were estimated to receive more remote instruction than students from low SES schools ( Kuhfeld et al., 2020 ). Even when students from low SES schools were able to access remote instruction, they were less likely to have the same high-quality remote learning or supportive environments (e.g., parental academic supervision, space with minimal distraction; Dorn et al., 2020 ). Dorn et al. (2020) projected that low-income students would experience 12.4 months of learning loss compared to the overall average learning loss of 6.8 months, exacerbating the existing opportunity gaps by 15% to 20%.

Some researchers have suggested that the short-term learning losses due to the pandemic may be cumulative and result in larger and permanent learning losses (e.g., Dorn et al., 2020 ; Kaffenberger, 2021 ). Dorn et al. (2020) estimated that the pandemic is likely to lead to higher high-school dropout rates (i.e., 2–9% increase to the current 5% rate) due to decreased academic engagement and achievement, and disruptions to supports that can help students stay in school (e.g., community support, youth-serving organizations), leading to long-term economic issues. Kaffenberger (2021) reported that learning loss in grade 3 would accumulate and result in students performing 1 to 1.5 years lower in grade 10. He also estimated that short-term remediation efforts (e.g., teachers covering 1/2 of grade 3 curriculum in grade 4 and reverting to the pre-pandemic curriculum and instructional levels by grade 5) would reduce the long-term learning loss to one-half of a school year. The long-term remediation efforts (e.g., identifying students’ learning levels via formative assessments, adapting teacher instructions) were estimated to fully mitigate the learning loss. That said, the pandemic is still on-going (with some school closures occurring again in early 2022 due to COVID-19 variants), and it is unlikely that schools and teachers were able to cover the same amount of content in the 2020–2021 school year as in typical years, or that they were able to provide the same levels of support to students from minoritized and disadvantaged populations that they do in typical years.

Despite these projections, the empirical data to evaluate the actual impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning is limited. Engzell et al. (2021) used national assessments conducted before (January to February) and after (June) the COVID-19 lockdown in the Netherlands. They compared student progress in mathematics, reading, and spelling on the national assessments during 2020 to student progress in the three previous years. Results indicated a learning loss equivalent to 3 percentile points despite the relatively short lockdown. However, the learning loss was up to 60% greater among students from disadvantaged backgrounds (i.e., students from less-educated households), indicating the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on student learning. Similarly, achievement scores on state assessments for students in grades 4 to 8 in 17 school districts in Illinois indicated that students scored significantly lower than expected in mathematics compared to prior to the pandemic, resulting in a learning losses as large as 56% of a school year ( Streich et al., 2021 ). Furthermore, special education status, English language learner status, and eligibility for free/reduced price lunch were associated with greater learning losses in mathematics among middle school students.

Taken together, although prior research has shown varying levels of impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning, it is evident that student learning was disrupted, leading to short-term and long-term detrimental effects on student achievement and educational attainment. Prior research also suggests that this learning loss may be particularly profound for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, leading to widening opportunity gaps. However, the current literature and our understanding of the impact of the pandemic on student learning is primarily based on model-based projections and limited empirical data comparing student performance prior to and after the lockdown. Detailed empirical data that can provide important contextual background for understanding the impact of the pandemic on student learning are missing.

Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to understand the instructional changes that occurred during the 2020–2021 school year and their impact on student learning from a national sample of elementary school teachers. Additionally, we sought information from teachers regarding the amount of academic content instruction provided to students and teachers’ perceptions of the learning supports needed and provided to students across the 2020–2021 school year. Furthermore, we aimed to explore whether teacher reported changes were related to prior school achievement data.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

For survey distribution, we obtained a representative random sample of K-5 educator email addresses that was proportionally reflective of the number of teachers in each grade (K-5) as well as representative of the distribution of the United States population across different geographic regions survey distribution from Market Data Retrieval (MDR). We made sure that only one teacher from each school was selected to maximize the number of schools. We calculated the total number of respondents ( N = 382) needed to achieve a margin of error of ± 5.0% with a 95% confidence interval ( Dillman, 2000 ). After excluding 289 invalid email address, we sent 9,476 teachers the invitation to complete the survey. Of those, 595 teachers provided consent, and 13 teachers who did not answer any questions were later excluded. The final sample consisted of 582 teachers, providing this survey with a ± 4.1% margin of error with a 95% confidence interval.

Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA; Reardon et al., 2021 ) provides demographics (e.g., region, gender, socioeconomic status, race) and academic achievement data (e.g., mathematics, English language arts) for all tested students in grades 3–8 in public schools across the United States averaged over the 2008–2009 to 2017–2018 school years. SEDA school-level mean mathematics and English language arts achievement data were available for 490 teachers, and covariate data were available for 515 teachers who responded to our survey. Given the lower than anticipated response rate (6.14%), we compared teachers who did and did not respond to the survey to ensure the generalizability of our findings. After correcting for Type I error rate, there were some statistically significant differences by geographic region. The Mid-Atlantic and South-Central regions were significantly under-represented in survey responders, whereas the Mountain and North-Central regions were significantly over-represented among survey responders. There were no other significant differences. We also compared our sample of teachers to national teacher demographics reported by the National Center for Educational Statistics ( Hussar et al., 2020 ). Overall, our sample approximated the national averages in terms of gender and race. However, teachers with over 20 years of teaching experience were over-represented in our samples (32.3%) compared to the national average (22.4%).

Survey Questions

We created and administered the survey using the Qualtrics electronic survey platform. The survey consisted of 59 items. The first eight questions were on demographics of teachers and students in their classrooms. Next, teachers answered questions about the instructional model(s) used by their schools. Additionally, we asked questions related to student progress and instruction in three specific academic content areas: reading, mathematics, and writing. The questions included the amount of planned curriculum teachers were able to cover, percentage of students needing extra support in each academic area, percentage of students who did not receive needed support for each academic area during the 2020–2021 school year compared to typical years prior to the COVID pandemic, and whether these changes were due to the pandemic. Teachers also rated the negative impacts the pandemic had on students overall, as well as on subpopulations of students (i.e., students from low-income backgrounds, students with IEPs, students who are English language learners). They also rated their perceived effectiveness of remote instruction. Finally, teachers answered questions about their opinions regarding the effectiveness of instruction during the pandemic.

Overall, our respondents had a mean of 15.44 years of teaching experience ( SD = 9.65) and a mean of 23 students in their class ( SD = 9.51) at the time of the survey. The majority (80.2%) reported having less than 20% of students with IEPs in their classroom. Similarly, 79.5% of teachers reported having classrooms with less than 20% English language learners.

Descriptive Analysis

Instructional model.

Figure 1 shows the instructional models teachers reported for their schools at the start and end of the 2020–2021 school year. At the start of the school year, most schools offered either 100% remote instruction (46.7%) or in-person instruction with an option for remote instruction (30.9%). Approximately 12.1% of schools offered hybrid, and only 8.6% of schools offered 100% in-person instruction. However, approximately 60% of teachers experienced a change in their instructional model from the beginning to the end of the school year. At the end of the school year, most schools offered in-person instruction with an option for remote instruction (65.2%), followed by 100% in-person (16.5%), hybrid (13.0%), and 100% remote (2.6%) instruction. Thus, the number of schools offering 100% in-person or in-person instruction with an option for remote instruction doubled from the beginning to the end of the 2020–2021 school year.

Figure 1. Teacher-reported school instructional models.

More specifically, 64.7% of teachers indicated that their instruction was 100% in person at least part of the 2020–2021 school year whereas 35.3% of teachers indicated that they never offered 100% in-person instruction. Among teachers who reported using a 100% in-person instructional model for at least part of the year, the percentage of the school year for which their school provided 100% in-person instruction varied: less than 20% of the school year (16.3%), between 21 and 40% (19.3%), between 41 and 60% of the year (15.2%), between 80 and 99% (15.8%), and 100% (19.0%).

Student Progress and Instruction in Academic Content Areas

Curriculum coverage.

Overall, teachers reported a significant decrease in the amount of planned curriculum they were able to cover in academic content areas (i.e., reading, mathematics, and writing) during the 2020–2021 school year compared to typical years. Figure 2 shows the percentage of planned curriculum teachers were able to cover in each academic area. During typical years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 93.3% of teachers indicated that they were able to cover more than 80% of planned curriculum in reading compared to only 43.8% of teachers during the 2020–2021 school year. In other words, more than half the teachers who responded to the survey (56.3%) were not able to cover 80% of their planned reading curriculum during the 2020–2021 school year, compared to only 6.7% of teachers during typical years. This pattern of findings was similar for mathematics. Only 53.2% of teachers reported that they were able to cover more than 80% of their planned curriculum in mathematics compared to 92.8% of teachers in typical years. For writing, about 30.9% of teachers indicated that they were able to cover more than 80% of planned curriculum during the 2020–2021 school year compared to 79.5% of teachers during typical years. Most teachers (85.4%) indicated that this change in their ability to cover the curriculum during the 2020–2021 school year was due to the pandemic. Other reasons reported by 4.8% of teachers included student absences, having a new administration team, and other natural disasters in addition to the pandemic.

Figure 2. Percentage of curriculum covered in each academic area.

Students Needing Extra Support/Intervention

Teachers indicated that fewer students who needed extra support and/or intervention in academic content areas actually received the support during the 2020–2021 school year compared to typical years. During typical years, teachers reported students were able to receive extra support/intervention they needed in reading (74.9%), mathematics (71.2%), and writing (70.2%). However, there was a significant decrease in the percentage of teachers who indicated that students received the needed support during the 2020–2021 school year: 44.3% in reading, 49.2% in mathematics, and 41.9% in writing.

Student Readiness for Transition

Teachers reported fewer students were ready to transition to the next grade level at the end of 2020–2021 school year compared to typical years (see Figure 3 ). Whereas 68.9% of teachers indicated at least 80% of their students being ready to transition to the next grade in typical years, only about 31.9% of teachers reported at least 80% of their students were ready to transition to the next grade at the end of the 2020–2021 school year. About 29.4% of teachers indicated that less than 60% of their students were ready to transition to the next grade level compared to only 4.5% of teachers indicating less than 60% of their students ready to transition in typical years. The majority of teachers (65.5%) indicated that this drop in the percentage of students ready to transition to the next grade was due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A small portion of respondents (6.2%) indicated other reasons, which included a lack of student participation, lack of teacher knowledge, and lack of high-quality instruction.

Figure 3. Percentage of students ready to transition to next grade.

Subpopulations of Students

Teachers rated the impact of the pandemic on their delivery of academic skills instruction on a 0 (no impact, delivery of academic instruction was typical) to 10 (high impact, students missed significant instructional time, delivery of instruction was very challenging, many students are behind) scale. Overall, the mean rating was 6.67 ( SD = 2.64), indicating a moderate to large impact of the pandemic on teachers’ delivery of academic instruction. Teachers indicated significantly greater impacts for students from low-income backgrounds ( M = 7.74, SD = 2.59) compared to those who were not from low-income backgrounds ( M = 4.83, SD = 2.59), t (457) = 24.04, p < 0.001. Teachers also rated significantly greater impacts for students with IEPs ( M = 7.43, SD = 2.90) compared to those without IEPs ( M = 5.51, SD = 2.71), t (455) = 15.64, p < 0.001. Finally, teachers rated significantly greater impacts for English language learners ( M = 7.31, SD = 2.88) compared to non-English language learners ( M = 5.45, SD = 2.84), t (389) = 13.78, p < 0.001.

Overall, teachers rated that remote instruction was significantly less effective for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Teachers rated remote instruction being more effective for students who were not from low-income backgrounds ( M = 5.66, SD = 2.51) compared to students from low-income backgrounds ( M = 4.13, SD = 3.02), t (432) = −10.17, p < 0.001. Teachers also rated that remote instruction was more effective for students without IEPs ( M = 5.45, SD = 2.43) than it was for those with IEPs ( M = 3.84, SD = 3.05), t (421) = −11.22, p < 0.001. Lastly, teachers rated that remote instruction was significantly more effective for students who were not English language learners ( M = 5.45, SD = 2.53) compared to English language learners ( M = 3.92, SD = 3.05), t (356) = −9.13, p < 0.001.

Inferential Analysis

Zero-order correlations.

Our third research question focused on the relations between school achievement indexed by SEDA and various survey questions, including use of a 100% in-person instructional model, percentage of students ready to transition to the next grade level in Spring 2021, overall impact of the pandemic on academic skills instruction, and the impact of the pandemic on teachers’ ability to cover the curriculum and provide intervention for specific academic skills. There was a small correlation between school achievement and the percentage of time in which a 100% in-person instructional model was used ( r = 0.19, p < 0.001), indicating higher achieving schools provided 100% in-person instruction more often than low achieving schools.

School achievement was moderately negatively correlated with overall ratings of the impact of the pandemic ( r = −0.29, p < 0.001) and with teacher-reported impacts of the pandemic on the percentage of students ready to transition to the next grade level ( r = −0.30, p < 0.001). This pattern of results indicated that teachers at higher achieving schools reported fewer negative effects of the pandemic, and teachers at higher achieving schools reported smaller differences in the number of students ready to transition to the next grade level between the 2020 and 2021 school year and typical years prior to the pandemic. School achievement was also correlated with teacher-reported impacts of the pandemic on specific academic content areas, but these correlations were small ( r s range from −0.11 to −0.19, all p s < 0.05). There were small correlations between the percent of the year a 100% in-person instructional model was used and teacher-reported impacts of the pandemic ( r s range from −0.18 to −0.22, all p s < 0.001), indicating that teachers who used more in-person instruction reported smaller impacts of the pandemic on their ability to cover the curriculum and the percentage of students who needed supplemental intervention for academic skills instruction.

Regression Analysis

To further evaluate our third research question, we examined predictors of the overall impact of the pandemic and the amount of the curriculum that was covered in reading, writing, and mathematics in the 2020–2021 school year, including SEDA school mean achievement and percentage of time in which a 100% in-person instructional model was used. Regression models predicting amount of curriculum covered in the 2020–2021 school year controlled for teacher reports of the amount of curriculum covered in typical years. Results are presented in Table 1 . We note that negative correlations for overall impact indicate that more in-person instruction and higher achieving schools experienced fewer negative effects of the pandemic. Positive correlations for coverage of reading, writing, and mathematics curriculum indicate that more in-person instruction and higher achieving schools were associated with covering more of the planned curriculum for academic skills. Both school achievement and percentage of time using a 100% in-person instructional model were significantly predictive of overall impacts of the pandemic and teacher reported coverage of the reading, writing, and mathematics curriculum, even after controlling for teacher reported coverage of the curriculum in typical years. Higher school achievement and more use of a 100% in-person instructional model were associated with smaller negative impacts of the pandemic and greater coverage of academic curricula.

Table 1. Standardized regression coefficients predicting overall impact and coverage of curriculum.

Finally, we used logistic regression analysis to examine whether SEDA school achievement and percentage of time using a 100% in-person instructional model predicted whether there were students who needed extra intervention in reading, writing, and mathematics but did not receive it in the 2020–2021 school year, after controlling for whether there were students who needed extra intervention but did not receive it in typical years. These results are presented in Table 2 . Use of a 100% in-person instructional model was only significant for mathematics, indicating that teachers who reported using more 100% in-person instruction were less likely to report having students who needed extra mathematics intervention but did not receive it; however, the magnitude of this effect was small. In contrast, higher achieving schools were significantly less likely than lower achieving schools to have students who needed additional intervention but did not receive it, even after controlling for students needing but not receiving intervention in typical years.

Table 2. Logistic regression models predicting whether students who needed additional supports for academic skills did not receive them.

Successes and Challenges of Instruction

For questions related to the successes and challenges of remote and in-person instruction during the 2020–2021 school year, teachers were allowed to indicate multiple items (i.e., check all that apply). Teachers indicated that having a lower teacher-student ratio would contribute to successful remote instruction (61.7%) followed by the structures and scheduling of remote instruction (52.6%), training opportunities (45%), and support personnel (e.g., paraprofessionals, 38.5%). The majority of other responses included having parental support at home and students’ access to better technology (internet access, remote instruction platform support), and having a teacher dedicated to remote instruction.

Teachers also indicated that distractions in students’ homes (71.1%), internet access/availability (61.0%), student attendance (60.8%), lack of face-to-face interactions with students (57.7%), difficulty with evaluating student work (55.7%), difficulty with monitoring student progress (48.8%), managing remote and in-person instruction simultaneously (42.6%), and difficulty with providing feedback on student work (40.7%) as challenges associated with delivering remote instruction. Other challenges included a lack of parental support/involvement, lack of student engagement, and parents or other household members completing student assignments or assessments.

Despite these challenges, teachers indicated that some positive takeaways during the 2020–2021 school year were students being more conscientious (68.6%), greater ability to provide individualized attention due to reduced class sizes or alternating days (21.6%), and more time for students to participate in academics due to reductions in extracurricular activities (21.1%). About 24.6% of teachers indicated that there were no positive takeaways from the 2020–2021 school year.

The results of this survey provide important context about the instructional models used by schools during the 2020–2021 school year, how content coverage may compound issues related to learning losses in academic areas, and factors that may be related to the ability of schools to cover content and support students. Several studies have demonstrated that student achievement has been lower during the pandemic compared to prior to the pandemic, with estimates ranging from three percentile points in the Netherlands ( Engzell et al., 2021 ) to more than half of a school year in the U.S. state of Illinois ( Streich et al., 2021 ). Moreover, students’ academic motivation and participation in extracurricular activities, as perceived by their parents, decreased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Zaccoletti et al., 2020 ).

Yet, the pandemic is not over, and with the continued struggle with the COVID variants in 2022 currently, students may be falling even further behind. The results of this survey suggest that most teachers were not able to cover at least 80% of their reading, writing, and mathematics curriculum, which was significantly lower than their reported ability to cover 80% of the curriculum in previous years. Teachers also clearly indicated that many fewer students were ready to transition to the next grade level at the end of the 2020–2021 school year. Using average reported class sizes and teacher responses for students not ready to transition to the next grade level, we estimated that 32.4% of students were not ready to transition, as compared to 13.9% in previous years (an increase of 18.5%). With 21.2 million K-5 students attending school in 2020 ( National Center for Education Statistics, 2021 ), this means nearly 3.9 million more students (6.8 million total) were not ready to transition to the next grade, with likely disproportionate impacts on minoritized students.

Our findings also indicated that many students who needed extra support/intervention in the academic content areas did not receive needed support in the 2020–2021 school year. This is alarming because it has likely compounded learning losses already realized during school shutdowns in spring of 2020, and some schools still may not be fully covering the academic curriculum in the 2021–2022 school year. This suggests there will be long term and compounded effects if teachers continue to have difficulty implementing the full curriculum. Therefore, our findings call for immediate recovery efforts.

Kaffenberger (2021) projected that short-term (e.g., covering previous year’s curriculum before revering to the pre-pandemic curriculum) and long-term efforts (e.g., identifying students’ needs using formative assessments, adapting teacher instruction to students’ levels and needs) can reduce/remediate the learning loss. Therefore, substantial restructuring of current pre-pandemic curricula may be inevitable to minimize the compounded effects. In addition, some states have initiated alternative ways to offer additional instruction (e.g., Tennessee Tutoring Coprs). Continued efforts should be made to find alternative and innovative ways to provide additional learning opportunities to remediate the learning loss. Beyond the immediate educational needs, Fusco et al. (2021) suggested providing career support for students to better prepare them for the economic crisis and changes following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our survey results indicated that most teachers relied on alternative forms of instruction and experienced changes during the 2020–2021 school year. Yet, the overall rating for teacher-reported effectiveness of remote instruction was low ( M = 4.74). This finding suggests that continued development of high-quality online educational learning and support is also needed. Moreover, Zhu and Liu (2020) called for more quantitative and qualitative research to evaluate remote teaching and learning, and long-term sustainability. Consistent with teachers’ reports in our survey, as well as in Goodrich et al. (2022) , more systematic training for school personnel is needed to improve the quality of remote instruction. Additionally, prior studies have found that family, school, and peer support increases student engagement, which in turn improves academic competence and achievement (e.g., Elias and Haynes, 2008 ; Estell and Perdue, 2013 ). As much as in-person school engagement is important to academic achievement and school completion, student engagement during remote instruction may be critical to promoting successful remote learning. Teachers who responded to our survey did note a lack of student engagement and parental support/involvement as a challenge to providing remote instruction. Such support from family, school, and peers may be especially important for students from disadvantaged backgrounds ( Elias and Haynes, 2008 ).

Our survey results also add to the growing literature that the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic learning have disproportionately affected low-income students, minoritized students, and students with disabilities (see Dorn et al., 2020 ; Goodrich et al., 2022 ). In the current survey, teachers reported greater impacts of the pandemic on academic instruction for students with IEPs, low-income students, and English language learners. Our regression analyses corroborate these findings across schools as well, as higher school achievement was associated with smaller negative impacts on the curriculum coverage and fewer students requiring additional intervention. Our results also indicate that teachers in higher performing schools did not have to alter their instruction as much as teachers in lower performing schools. This may have played a role in the reported curriculum coverage and associated learning losses, as our results indicated that the amount of in-person instruction significantly contributed to teachers’ ability to cover the curriculum. These findings are important to consider when allocating resources for pandemic recovery efforts. Moreover, the COVID-19 induced economic damage and educational budget cuts are likely to have a greater impact on students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Recovery efforts should be considered carefully, so that they do not reinforce existing inequalities.

Our findings also add to the literature in an important way by providing teachers with an opportunity to identify other factors that may have contributed to their ability to cover the curricula and support their students. This can offer Federal and State Departments of Education with areas of opportunity for providing teachers with support, funding, or intervention resources. For example, teachers consistently reported that personnel and training resources can contribute to better implementation of instruction (including remote instruction). Solutions might include increasing the number of paraprofessionals to assist with instruction and/or providing training opportunities to teachers and paraprofessionals.

Positive Take-Aways and Potential Solutions

Approximately 75% of teachers indicated that there were also some positives that came out of the pandemic, including increases in student conscientiousness, prioritization of some academic content, and systems that resulted in more individual attention. Policymakers and administrators may want to consider thinking more flexibly about school schedules and supports for teachers and students moving forward. Alternating days for instruction for students to reduce class sizes may not be desirable or feasible in the long-term, but there may be other creative approaches to continue capitalize on the benefits of smaller student groupings, such as staggering start and end times for the school day.

Limitations

The samples of teachers who completed our surveys were generally representative of the population of teachers in the United States However, a large percentage of teachers did not respond to the surveys. Although responders and non-responders were similar in key demographic variables (e.g., SES, school setting, school type, grade level taught), it is possible that low response rate resulted in selection bias. It is also possible that the teachers may have under- or over-estimated other descriptive variables for their classrooms or were unaware of some of the school services provided by resource and special education teachers.

Implications and Conclusion

Schools in the United States have a large problem on their hands. Along with learning losses, many teachers report not covering as much of the academic curricula for students, especially in schools with lower achievement levels. This is an ongoing problem that is likely to be exacerbated, and it will likely continue to widen the opportunity gaps for minoritized students, low-income students, and students with disabilities. Policymakers, school administrators, and teachers must be cognizant of the challenges with implementing instruction consistently to adequately cover the necessary content each year, and even increase the content coverage and student support to accelerate recovery efforts. Of course, these considerations need to be weighed against public health safety, which is an important factor in deciding which educational models to implement. It will also be important for educational decision makers to consider these teacher report findings when allocating recovery resources, such as prioritizing lower achieving schools and students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by IRB at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

JN, JG, MH, and NK were equally responsible for the conduct of this research. All authors helped formulate the research questions to be included in surveys, assisted with survey distribution, data cleaning and analysis, and writing survey results for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Dillman, D. A. (2000). Mail and Internet Surveys: The Tailored Design Method. New York, NY: Wiley and Sons.

Google Scholar

Dorn, E., Hancock, B., Sarakatsannis, J., and Viruleg, E. (2020). COVID-19 and Student Learning in the United States: The Hurt Could last a Lifetime. New York, NY: McKinsey & Company.

Elias, M. J., and Haynes, N. M. (2008). Social competence, social support, and academic achievement in minority, low-income, urban elementary school children. Sch. Psychol. Q. 23, 474–495. doi: 10.1037/1045-3830.23.4.474

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Engzell, P., Frey, A., and Verhagen, M. (2021). Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118:e2022376118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2022376118

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Estell, D. B., and Perdue, N. H. (2013). Social support and behavioral and affective school engagement: the effects of peers, parents, and teachers. Psychol. Sch. 50, 325–337. doi: 10.1002/pits.21681

Fusco, L., Parola, A., and Sica, L. S. (2021). Life design for youth as a creativity-based intervention for transforming a challenging world. Front. Psychol. 12:662072. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.662072

Goodrich, J. M., Hebert, M., and Namkung, J. M. (2022). Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on elementary school teachers’ practices and perceptions across the spring and fall 2020 semesters. Front. Educ. 6:793285. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.793285

Hussar, B., Zhang, J., Hein, S., Wang, K., Roberts, A., Cui, J., et al. (2020). The Condition of Education 2020 (NCES2020-144). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.

Kaffenberger, M. (2021). Modelling the long-run learning impact of the Covid-19 learning shock: actions to (more than) mitigate loss. Int. J. Educ. Dev. 81:102326. doi: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2020.102326

Kuhfeld, M. (2019). Suprising new evidence on summer learning loss. Phi Delta Kappan 101, 25–29. doi: 10.1177/0031721719871560

Kuhfeld, M., Soland, J., Tarasawa, B., Johnsons, A., Ruzek, E., and Liu, J. (2020). Projecting the potential impact of COVID-19 school closures on academic achievement. Educ. Res. 49, 549–565.

National Center for Education Statistics (2021). State Nonfiscal Survey of Public Elementary/Secondary Education, 1999–2000 Through 2019–20 and 2020–21 Preliminary. Available online at: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_203.65.asp

Reardon, S. F., Ho, A. D., Shear, B. R., Fahle, E. M., Kalogrides, D., Jang, H., et al. (2021). Stanford Education Data Archive (Version 4.1). Available Online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/db586ns4974 (accessed June 15, 2022).

Stanistreet, P., Elfert, M., and Atchoarena, D. (2020). Education in the age of COVID-19: understanding the consequences. Int. Rev. Educ. 66, 627–633. doi: 10.1007/s11159-020-09880-9

Streich, F., Pan, J., Ye, C., and Xia, J. (2021). REL Report: Estimating Changes to Student Learning in Illinois Following Extended School Building Closures Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Columbia: Institute of Education Sciences.

United Nations (2020). Policy Brief: Education During COVID-19 and Beyond. Available Online at: doi: 10.18356/21e7d903-en (accessed June 15, 2022).

von Hippel, P. T., Workman, J., and Downey, D. B. (2018). Inequality in reading and math skills forms mainly before kindergarten: a replication, and partical correction, of “Are schools the great equalizer?” Sociol. Educ. 91, 323–357.

Zaccoletti, S., Camacho, A., Correia, N., Aguiar, C., Mason, L., Alves, R. A., et al. (2020). Parents’ perceptions of student academic motivation during the COVID-19 lockdown: a cross-country comparison. Front. Psychol. 11:592670. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.592670

Zhu, X., and Liu, J. (2020). Education in and after COVID0-19: immediate responses and long-term visions. Postdigit. Sci. Educ. 2, 695–699. doi: 10.1007/s42438-020-00126-3

Keywords : COVID-19, survey research, elementary school, academic instruction, opportunity gaps

Citation: Namkung JM, Goodrich JM, Hebert M and Koziol N (2022) Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Student Learning and Opportunity Gaps Across the 2020–2021 School Year: A National Survey of Teachers. Front. Educ. 7:921497. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2022.921497

Received: 15 April 2022; Accepted: 10 June 2022; Published: 07 July 2022.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Namkung, Goodrich, Hebert and Koziol. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Jessica M. Namkung, [email protected]

Share full article

Supported by

It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading

The fallout from the pandemic is just being felt. “We’re in new territory,” educators say.

By Dana Goldstein

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year’s reading emergency.

As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic.

In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which the researchers described as “alarming.”

In the Boston region, 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems — twice the number of students as before the pandemic, according to Tiffany P. Hogan, director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.

Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind.

“We’re in new territory,” Dr. Hogan said about the pandemic’s toll on reading. If children do not become competent readers by the end of elementary school, the risks are “pretty dramatic,” she said. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of high school, earn less money as adults and become involved in the criminal justice system.

The literacy crisis did not start with the pandemic. In 2019, results on national and international exams showed stagnant or declining American performance in reading, and widening gaps between high and low performers. The causes are multifaceted, but many experts point to a shortage of educators trained in phonics and phonemic awareness — the foundational skills of linking the sounds of spoken English to the letters that appear on the page.

The pandemic has compounded those issues.

Children spent months out of the classroom, where they were supposed to learn the basics of reading — the ABCs, what sound a “b” or “ch” makes. Many first and second graders returned to classrooms needing to review parts of the kindergarten curriculum. But nearly half of public schools have teaching vacancies, especially in special education and the elementary grades, according to a federal survey conducted in December and January.

Even students with well-trained teachers have had far fewer hands-on hours with them than before the pandemic, which has been defined by closures, uneven access to online instruction, quarantine periods and — even on the best days — virus-related interruptions to regular classroom routines. Now, schools are under pressure to boost literacy as quickly as possible so students gain the reading skills they need to learn the rest of the curriculum, from math word problems to civics lessons. Billions of federal stimulus dollars are flowing to districts for tutoring and other supports, but their effect may be limited if schools cannot find quality staff members to hire.

At Capital Preparatory Harbor Lower School, a charter elementary school in the working-class coastal city of Bridgeport, Conn., about half of the first graders did not set foot inside a classroom during their crucial kindergarten year. Though the school building reopened in January 2021 on a hybrid schedule, many families, concerned about the virus, opted to continue full-time remote learning.

At the beginning of this school year, when all students returned to in-person learning, more than twice as many first graders as before the pandemic tested at kindergarten levels or below in their literacy skills, according to the administration.

Teachers started with the basics: how to orient and hold a book, and where the names of the author and illustrator could be found. The school is using federal stimulus dollars to create classroom libraries filled with titles that appeal to the largely Black and Hispanic students there, like “Firebird,” about a young, Black dancer by the ballerina Misty Copeland, and “Hair Love,” about a Black father styling his daughter’s hair.

The stimulus money is also paying for a new structured phonics curriculum called Fundations . Given the depth of many students’ struggles with reading, the work has taken on “a level of urgency,” said Garensha John, a first-grade teacher at the school. “Let’s get it done. As soon as they know this, they’ll excel.”

From the start of the pandemic, when schools abruptly shuttered in March 2020, math skills were clearly affected , while some early research suggested that students’ reading skills were holding steady, perhaps because more parents read with their children at home than practiced math.

But now, “What we’re seeing is that there are a lot of children who didn’t get the stimulation they need” during the pandemic to adequately develop early speech and reading skills, which are closely linked, Dr. Hogan said.

On a Wednesday morning in February, Mrs. John arrayed 13 6- and 7-year-olds on a rug in front of her, and led them through a series of well-rehearsed exercises sounding out simple written letter combinations and words. The children, clad in uniforms, chanted and clapped as they read in unison. The word of the day was a difficult one for many children to read and pronounce: “ships.”

Cameron Segui, 7, wearing a blue surgical mask and black glasses, placed his hand under his chin, a strategy students use to check if their mouths are positioned correctly. The sound “puh” should be made with the jaw relatively high up, for example, with the cheeks puffing out. “Zh” makes the jaw vibrate, but the “sh” and “s” sounds in “ships” should not.

Some parents and educators have argued that masks are partially responsible for language and literacy deficits. But researchers say that unlike the well-documented connection between school closures and decreased achievement, there is not yet strong evidence that masking has hindered the development of reading skills.

Such conclusions “would just be conjecture at this point,” said Nathan Clemens, a dyslexia expert at the University of Texas, Austin.

Later that day in Mrs. John’s class, students broke into small groups to practice writing and segmenting words into different sounds. Cameron, in one of the more advanced groups, was working on full sentences, and pointed proudly to his writing: “Ben had a red and tan hat,” he read.

The biggest problem for Capital Prep, and many other schools, is a shortage of educators like Mrs. John, 30, a Tufts University graduate who received formal training in phonics instruction in a previous job. Many graduates of teacher-preparation programs lack this skill set, and some of the nation’s most popular reading curriculums do not emphasize it, despite a large body of research showing it is crucial.

States like Mississippi, Alabama and Massachusetts have begun retraining teachers in phonics and decommissioning outdated curriculum materials. But some efforts were interrupted or slowed by the pandemic.

At Capital Prep, Mrs. John’s students have made big leaps since September. She serves as a model for colleagues, and the school is providing professional development. Still, in February, there were seven open teaching jobs out of 23 at the school, with some students being taught by inexperienced substitutes. Steve Perry, the founder of the Capital Prep charter school network, which has schools in both Connecticut and New York, recently took a trip to Puerto Rico to recruit educators.

Dr. Hogan, the Boston researcher, has a federal grant to provide intensive, small-group tutoring to children at high-poverty schools who are behind on early reading skills. She, too, has struggled to fill open positions, despite pushing the pay to up to $40 per hour from $15 per hour.

“I’m running on fumes,” she said.

It does not help that there is surging demand for private reading and speech therapy for children from affluent families. Fees can run up to $200 per hour, allowing some educators to leave the classroom entirely.

Tamara Cella, a phonics specialist who holds a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, left the New York City public school system in 2016, frustrated by the strain of principal turnover. In addition to a job at a New Jersey private school, she now moonlights as a phonics tutor for Brooklyn Letters, a company that provides in-home sessions.

“Tutoring pays extremely well,” Dr. Cella acknowledged.

She tutors children facing some of the same challenges as those at Capital Prep — missing core phonics skills, and difficulty transitioning from simple reading exercises to comprehending books. But Dr. Cella worries more about the students she no longer sees.

“That feeling of guilt comes over me,” she said. “What about the kids in the Bronx?”

Dana Goldstein is a national correspondent, writing about how education policies impact families, students and teachers across the country. She is the author of “The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession.” More about Dana Goldstein

Election 2024
Entertainment
Newsletters
Photography
Personal Finance
AP Investigations
AP Buyline Personal Finance
AP Buyline Shopping
Press Releases
Israel-Hamas War
Russia-Ukraine War
Global elections
Asia Pacific
Latin America
Middle East
Election Results
Delegate Tracker
AP & Elections
Auto Racing
2024 Paris Olympic Games
Movie reviews
Book reviews
Personal finance
Financial Markets
Business Highlights
Financial wellness
Artificial Intelligence
Social Media

Most US students are recovering from pandemic-era setbacks, but millions are making up little ground

Fifth grade students attend a math lesson with teacher Jana Lamontagne, right, during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

A fifth grade student explains a math answer to his classmate during a math lesson at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Fifth grade students attend a math lesson with teacher Alex Ventresca, right, during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

A fifth grade student attends a math lesson during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Fifth grade students work on computers during a math class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Fifth grade teacher Jana Lamontagne, center, teaches a math lesson during class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Osbell, 9, works on the Ignite program with a live tutor, during a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Bridget, 9, attends a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Jaelene, 9, works on a computer during a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Students work on a writing assignment during a third grade English language arts class at Mount Vernon Community School, in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Wells Preparatory Elementary School principal Vincent Izuegbu talks about the school’s mission to overcome the effects of remote pandemic learning Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In the classroom, the school put a sharper focus on collaboration. Along with academic setbacks, students came back from school closures with lower maturity levels, said Izuegbu. “We do not let 10 minutes go by without a teacher giving students the opportunity to engage with the subject,” Izuegbu said. “That’s very, very important in terms of the growth that we’ve seen.” (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

The Wells Preparatory Elementary School Student Creed hangs on the wall behind principal Vincent Izuegbu on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. At Wells Preparatory Elementary on the South Side, just 3% of students met state reading standards in 2021. Last year, 30% hit the mark. Federal relief allowed the school to hire an interventionist for the first time, and teachers get paid to team up on recovery outside working hours. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Wells Preparatory Elementary School student Olorunkemi Atoyebi, responds to a question during an interview with The Associated Press on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. Atoyebi was an A student before the pandemic, but after spending fifth grade behind a computer screen, she fell behind. During remote learning, she was nervous about stopping class to ask questions. Before long, math lessons stopped making sense. When she returned to in classroom learning other students worked in groups, her math teacher helped her one-on-one. Atoyebi learned a rhyming song to help memorize multiplication tables. Over time, it began to click. “They made me feel more confident in everything,” said Atoyebi, now 14. “My confidence started going up, my grades started going up, my scores started going up. Everything has felt like I understand it better."(AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Students at the Wells Preparatory Elementary School make their way to the cafeteria past reminders of the education and subjects they are receiving on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared to 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

The desktop of a student at the Wells Preparatory Elementary School reflects the literature they are studying in Charlotte Owens’ fifth grade class on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared to 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Wells Preparatory Elementary School teacher Charlotte Owens, left, works with her fifth grade students during the literature segment of their day, Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared to 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Copy Link copied

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — On one side of the classroom, students circled teacher Maria Fletcher and practiced vowel sounds. In another corner, children read together from a book. Scattered elsewhere, students sat at laptop computers and got reading help from online tutors.

For the third graders at Mount Vernon Community School in Virginia, it was an ordinary school day. But educators were racing to get students learning more, faster, and to overcome setbacks that have persisted since schools closed for the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago.

America’s schools have started to make progress toward getting students back on track. But improvement has been slow and uneven across geography and economic status, with millions of students — often those from marginalized groups — making up little or no ground.

Nationally, students made up one-third of their pandemic losses in math during the past school year and one-quarter of the losses in reading, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard , an analysis of state and national test scores by researchers at Harvard and Stanford.

Bishop Charles Lampkin, a pastor in Memphis has started offering tutoring at his church after school to help children who have pandemic learning loss, Friday, Oct. 28, 2022, in Memphis, Tenn. (AP Photo/Karen Pulfer Focht)

But in nine states, including Virginia, reading scores continued to fall during the 2022-23 school year after previous decreases during the pandemic.

Clouding the recovery is a looming financial crisis. States have used some money from the historic $190 billion in federal pandemic relief to help students catch up , but that money runs out later this year.

“The recovery is not finished, and it won’t be finished without state action,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist behind the scorecard. “States need to start planning for what they’re going to do when the federal money runs out in September. And I think few states have actually started that discussion.”

Virginia lawmakers approved an extra $418 million last year to accelerate recovery. Massachusetts officials set aside $3.2 million to provide math tutoring for fourth and eighth grade students who are behind grade level, along with $8 million for literacy tutoring.

But among other states with lagging progress, few said they were changing their strategies or spending more to speed up improvement.

Virginia hired online tutoring companies and gave schools a “playbook” showing how to build effective tutoring programs. Lisa Coons, Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, said last year’s state test scores were a wake-up call.

“We weren’t recovering as fast as we needed,” Coons said in an interview.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has called for states to continue funding extra academic help for students as the federal money expires.

“We just can’t stop now,” he said at a May 30 conference for education journalists. “The states need to recognize these interventions work. Funding public education does make a difference.”

In Virginia, the Alexandria district received $2.3 million in additional state money to expand tutoring.

At Mount Vernon, where classes are taught in English and Spanish, students are divided into groups and rotate through stations customized to their skill level. Those who need the most help get online tutoring. In Fletcher’s classroom, a handful of students wore headsets and worked with tutors through Ignite Learning, one of the companies hired by the state.

With tutors in high demand, the online option has been a big help, Mount Vernon principal Jennifer Hamilton said.

“That’s something that we just could not provide here,” she said.

Ana Marisela Ventura Moreno said her 9-year-old daughter, Sabrina, benefited significantly from extra reading help last year during second grade, but she’s still catching up.

“She needs to get better. She’s not at the level she should be,” the mother said in Spanish. She noted the school did not offer the tutoring help this year, but she did not know why.

Alexandria education officials say students scoring below proficient or close to that cutoff receive high-intensity tutoring help and they have to prioritize students with the greatest needs. Alexandria trailed the state average on math and reading exams in 2023, but it’s slowly improving.

More worrying to officials are the gaps: Among poorer students at Mount Vernon, just 24% scored proficient in math and 28% hit the mark in reading. That’s far lower than the rates among wealthier students, and the divide is growing wider.

Failing to get students back on track could have serious consequences. The researchers at Harvard and Stanford found communities with higher test scores have higher incomes and lower rates of arrest and incarceration. If pandemic setbacks become permanent, it could follow students for life.

The Education Recovery Scorecard tracks about 30 states, all of which made at least some improvement in math from 2022 to 2023. The states whose reading scores fell in that span, in addition to Virginia, were Nevada, California, South Dakota, Wyoming, Indiana, Oklahoma, Connecticut and Washington.

Only a few states have rebounded to pre-pandemic testing levels. Alabama was the only state where math achievement increased past 2019 levels, while Illinois, Mississippi and Louisiana accomplished that in reading.

In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023. Math gains were less dramatic, with students still behind almost half a grade level compared with 2019. Chicago officials credit the improvement to changes made possible with nearly $3 billion in federal relief.

The district trained hundreds of Chicago residents to work as tutors. Every school building got an interventionist, an educator who focuses on helping struggling students.

The district also used federal money for home visits and expanded arts education in an effort to re-engage students.

“Academic recovery in isolation, just through ‘drill and kill,’ either tutoring or interventions, is not effective,” said Bogdana Chkoumbova, the district’s chief education officer. “Students need to feel engaged.”

At Wells Preparatory Elementary on the city’s South Side, just 3% of students met state reading standards in 2021. Last year, 30% hit the mark. Federal relief allowed the school to hire an interventionist for the first time, and teachers get paid to team up on recovery outside working hours.

In the classroom, the school put a sharper focus on collaboration. Along with academic setbacks, students came back from school closures with lower maturity levels, principal Vincent Izuegbu said. By building lessons around discussion, officials found students took more interest in learning.

“We do not let 10 minutes go by without a teacher giving students the opportunity to engage with the subject,” Izuegbu said. “That’s very, very important in terms of the growth that we’ve seen.”

Olorunkemi Atoyebi was an A student before the pandemic, but after spending fifth grade learning at home, she fell behind. During remote learning, she was nervous about stopping class to ask questions. Before long, math lessons stopped making sense.

When she returned to school, she struggled with multiplication and terms such as “dividend” and “divisor” confused her.

While other students worked in groups, her math teacher took her aside for individual help. Atoyebi learned a rhyming song to help memorize multiplication tables. Over time, it began to click.

“They made me feel more confident in everything,” said Atoyebi, now 14. “My grades started going up. My scores started going up. Everything has felt like I understand it better.”

Associated Press writers Michael Melia in Hartford, Connecticut, and Chrissie Thompson in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

A Bipartisan Bill Aims to Boost AI Education for K-12 Teachers

More than half of educators believe that students will need some knowledge of artificial intelligence to succeed in the workplace of the future, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey conducted late last year.

It appears that at least some lawmakers in Congress have come to the same conclusion.

U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Jerry Moran, R-Kan., this month introduced the bipartisan NSF AI Education Act of 2024 . The bill seeks to expand scholarship aid and professional development opportunities for K-12 educators interested in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, with support from the National Science Foundation or NSF.

Quantum computing , like AI, is a rapidly developing field related to computer science, which seeks to harness technology to quickly solve problems.

The legislation would create a grant program at the NSF to promote research on teaching AI at K-12 schools, with a focus on schools that serve low-income, rural, and tribal students. The bill leaves the size of the grant program up to NSF.

This bill also calls on NSF to award undergraduate and graduate scholarships for future educators, as well as students interested in farming and advanced manufacturing, to study AI. The grants would be given directly to post-secondary institutions to cover students’ tuition and fees and to provide them with a stipend.

The bill directs NSF to develop publicly available “playbooks” for introducing AI in P-12 classrooms nationwide. The playbooks would include a special focus on schools in rural or economically struggling communities.

This guidance would be in addition to AI resources that the Biden administration has directed the U.S. Education Department to release this year , including a forthcoming AI policy toolkit.

The bill calls on NSF to conduct an outreach campaign on its AI and quantum education opportunities at K-12 schools and post-secondary institutions.

“The emerging tech jobs of tomorrow are here today,” Cantwell said in a statement. “Demand for AI expertise is already high and will continue to grow. This bill will open doors to AI for students at all levels, and upskill our workforce.”

“Artificial intelligence has tremendous potential, but it will require a skilled and capable workforce to unlock its capabilities,” Moran said in a statement. “If we want to fully understand AI and remain globally competitive, we must invest in the future workforce today.”

‘There’s a real dearth of practical resources’

At least one advocate for AI education is heartened that some in Congress have begun to focus on this issue—and particularly pleased by the legislation’s focus on research on AI in education.

Educators are asking, “when are we going to understand the potential positive impact of generative AI on schools but also the potential harms that we need to mitigate?” said Amanda Bickerstaff, the CEO of AI for Education, a business that works with educators the responsible adoption of AI in schools.

She’s glad that the bill may allow NSF to start creating materials for AI in education.

“There’s a dearth of really practical resources, and there’s a real need for educators to get their hands around what to actually start doing within their classrooms to support student learning,” as well as how to use the tools in a smart way to develop lesson plans, assignments, and complete other tasks, Bickerstaff said.

This is at least the second piece of bipartisan legislation introduced in this Congress to promote AI literacy. In December, Reps. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., and Larry Bucshon, R-Ind., introduced the “Artificial Intelligence Literacy Act.”

That measure would shine a spotlight on the importance of teaching AI literacy. It would make it clear that K-12 schools, colleges, nonprofits, and libraries can use grants available under an existing program—the $1.25 billion Digital Equity Competitive Grant program —to support AI literacy. It defines AI literacy as understanding the basic principles of AI, its applications and limitations, as well as ethical considerations.

Importantly, neither bill would set aside new money for teaching AI, though a spokeswoman for the Democrats on the Senate commerce committee, which Cantwell chairs and on which Moran serves as a senior member, said Cantwell will work to ensure NSF has the funds it needs to implement these programs.

The agency currently receives $9.05 billion, for fiscal year 2024 but Cantwell and other leaders are pushing for $15.6 billion for fiscal year 2025 the amount specified in a recent bipartisan law aimed in part at advancing economic competitiveness through STEM education, the spokeswoman said.

While the lack of dedicated new funds might disappoint educators hoping for additional resources, it also may boost the measures’ chance of passing, as Congress is operating under a bipartisan deal with significant spending constraints.

Sign Up for EdWeek Update

Edweek top school jobs.

From left, David Banks, chancellor of New York Public schools, speaks next to Karla Silvestre, President of the Montgomery Count (Md.) Board of Education, Emerson Sykes, Staff Attorney with the ACLU, and Enikia Ford Morthel, Superintendent of the Berkeley United School District, during a hearing on antisemitism in K-12 public schools, at the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education, on May 8, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Sign Up & Sign In

40 Facts About Elektrostal

Written by Lanette Mayes

Modified & Updated: 01 Jun 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.

This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.

So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.

Key Takeaways:

Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.

Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”

Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.

Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.

Boasts a rich industrial heritage.

Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.

Founded in 1916.

The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.

Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.

Known for its vibrant cultural scene.

Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.

A popular destination for nature lovers.

Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.

Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.

Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.

Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.

Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.

Boasts excellent education facilities.

The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.

A center for scientific research and innovation.

Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy , materials science, and engineering.

Surrounded by picturesque lakes.

The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes , offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.

Well-connected transportation system.

Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.

Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.

Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.

Home to notable architectural landmarks.

Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.

Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.

Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.

Provides a high standard of healthcare.

Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.

Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.

The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.

A hub for sports enthusiasts.

Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.

Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.

Electric power played a significant role in its early development.

Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.

Boasts a thriving economy.

The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.

Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.

The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.

Popular destination for winter sports.

Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.

Promotes environmental sustainability.

Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Home to renowned educational institutions.

Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.

Committed to cultural preservation.

The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.

Hosts an annual International Film Festival.

The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.

Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development .

Offers a range of housing options.

Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.

Home to notable sports teams.

Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy , with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.

Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.

Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.

Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.

Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.

Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.

Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.

Commemorates historical events.

The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.

Promotes sports and youth development.

Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.

Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.

Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.

The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.

Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.

The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.

A city with a bright future.

Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.

In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.

Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?

A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.

Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?

A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.

Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.

Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.

Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.

Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.

Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?

A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.

Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.

Elektrostal's fascinating history, vibrant culture, and promising future make it a city worth exploring. For more captivating facts about cities around the world, discover the unique characteristics that define each city . Uncover the hidden gems of Moscow Oblast through our in-depth look at Kolomna. Lastly, dive into the rich industrial heritage of Teesside, a thriving industrial center with its own story to tell.

Was this page helpful?

Our commitment to delivering trustworthy and engaging content is at the heart of what we do. Each fact on our site is contributed by real users like you, bringing a wealth of diverse insights and information. To ensure the highest standards of accuracy and reliability, our dedicated editors meticulously review each submission. This process guarantees that the facts we share are not only fascinating but also credible. Trust in our commitment to quality and authenticity as you explore and learn with us.

Share this Fact:

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Architecture: Heritage, Traditions and Innovations (AHTI 2020)

The Academy of Construction and Architecture of the USSR: Formation of the Idea of a New Goal in the Conditions of Transition to “Industrial Rails”

Article details Download article (PDF)

The Unique Burial of a Child of Early Scythian Time at the Cemetery of Saryg-Bulun (Tuva)

<< Previous page

Pages: 379-406

In 1988, the Tuvan Archaeological Expedition (led by M. E.вЂЇKilunovskaya and V. A.вЂЇSemenov) discovered a unique burial of the early Iron Age at Saryg-Bulun in Central Tuva. There are two burial mounds of the Aldy-Bel culture dated by 7th century BC. Within the barrows, which adjoined one another, forming a figure-of-eight, there were discovered 7 burials, from which a representative collection of artifacts was recovered. Burial 5 was the most unique, it was found in a coffin made of a larch trunk, with a tightly closed lid. Due to the preservative properties of larch and lack of air access, the coffin contained a well-preserved mummy of a child with an accompanying set of grave goods. The interred individual retained the skin on his face and had a leather headdress painted with red pigment and a coat, sewn from jerboa fur. The coat was belted with a leather belt with bronze ornaments and buckles. Besides that, a leather quiver with arrows with the shafts decorated with painted ornaments, fully preserved battle pick and a bow were buried in the coffin. Unexpectedly, the full-genomic analysis, showed that the individual was female. This fact opens a new aspect in the study of the social history of the Scythian society and perhaps brings us back to the myth of the Amazons, discussed by Herodotus. Of course, this discovery is unique in its preservation for the Scythian culture of Tuva and requires careful study and conservation.

Keywords: Tuva, Early Iron Age, early Scythian period, Aldy-Bel culture, barrow, burial in the coffin, mummy, full genome sequencing, aDNA

Information about authors: Marina Kilunovskaya (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Vladimir Semenov (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Varvara Busova (Moscow, Russian Federation). (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Kharis Mustafin (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Technical Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Irina Alborova (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Biological Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Alina Matzvai (Moscow, Russian Federation). Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected]

Shopping Cart Items: 0 Cart Total: 0,00 в‚¬ place your order

Price pdf version

student - 2,75 в‚¬ individual - 3,00 в‚¬ institutional - 7,00 в‚¬

IMAGES

The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2020
March 2-6, 2020 School Newsletter
Our Best Education Articles of 2020
MTG School Books by the New National Education Policy 2020
How New Education Policy 2020 Make Kids Future-Ready?
New Education Policy

VIDEO

Year in review: the troubles and triumphs of Kentuckiana schools in 2020
ARTICLE II Study
New concerns as schools begin in-person instruction amid pandemic
U.S. Constitution Vocabulary
Making education more equitable through digital learning
Copy of World education today: Insights from the launch of Education at a Glance 2023

COMMENTS

Our Best Education Articles of 2020
Our most popular education articles of 2020 can help you manage difficult emotions and other challenges at school in the pandemic, all while supporting the social-emotional well-being of your students. In addition to these articles, you can also find tips, tools, and recommended readings in two resource guides we created in 2020: Supporting ...
The pandemic has had devastating impacts on learning. What ...
Even more concerning, test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20% in math (corresponding to 0.20 SDs) and 15% in reading (0.13 SDs ...
PDF Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on K-12 Education: A Systematic
Education (Gross & Opalka, 2020) and their systematic review of school districts' and charter management organizations' web sites. The American Institutes of Research (AIR) also launched a ... and there is a dearth of research on elementary learners (Arnesen et al. 2019). Researchers of full-time K-12 virtual schools (Ahn & McEachin,
Frontiers
Following the closure of schools in the spring 2020 semester due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed two surveys to understand how the pandemic affected elementary education in the U.S. First, we distributed a survey at the end of the spring 2020 semester to understand how school closures impacted delivery of instruction. Second, we conducted a follow up survey in November 2020 to determine ...
Kids Are Behind in Math Because of COVID-19. Here's ...
It also found students lost more ground in math than reading, and 5 to 9 percentage points more students scored two or more grade levels behind in math. In any case, none of the research so far is ...
The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2020
1. To Teach Vocabulary, Let Kids Be Thespians. When students are learning a new language, ask them to act out vocabulary words. It's fun to unleash a child's inner thespian, of course, but a 2020 study concluded that it also nearly doubles their ability to remember the words months later. Researchers asked 8-year-old students to listen to ...
U.S. Elementary Students Fell Months Behind During Pandemic, Report
July 27, 2021. Elementary school students in the United States ended the 2020-21 school year four to five months behind where they normally would have been in academic achievement, according to a ...
The Elementary School Journal
ABOUT THE JOURNAL Frequency: 4 issues/year ISSN: 0013-5984 E-ISSN: 1554-8279 2022 CiteScore*: 2.5 Ranked #583 out of 1,469 "Education" journals. The Elementary School Journal has served researchers, teacher educators, and practitioners in the elementary and middle school education for more than one hundred years.ESJ publishes peer-reviewed articles that pertain to both education theory and ...
U.S. Education in the Time of COVID
Spring 2020. In spring 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of American schools transitioned to distance education models. During this period, 77 percent of public schools moved to online distance learning and 84 percent of college students reported having some or all classes moved to online-only instruction.
Elementary school teachers' perspectives about learning during the
Their responses provided relevant insights into how education took place during the COVID-19 health crisis, especially during the 2020-2021 school year, the first to fully occur within the pandemic.
Education Trends
The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2020. We reviewed hundreds of educational studies in 2020 and then highlighted 10 of the most significant—covering topics from virtual learning to the reading wars and the decline of standardized tests.
Education Week
At Education Week, ... Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more. ... 2020. Allison Shelley/EDUimages English ...
PDF Impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic on Public and Private
Pandemic on Public and Private Elementary and Secondary Education in the United States (Preliminary Data): First Look Results from the 2020-21 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) February 2022 NCES 2022-019 U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION. A Publication of the National Center for Education Statistics
The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2021
3. The Surprising Power of Pretesting. Asking students to take a practice test before they've even encountered the material may seem like a waste of time—after all, they'd just be guessing. But new research concludes that the approach, called pretesting, is actually more effective than other typical study strategies.
Limits and Virtues of Educational Technology in Elementary School
Mathematics is an essential skill to learn (Kazanidis & Pellas, 2019).In addition to providing the necessary tools for the everyday life, they also form the base on which many other subjects and skills are built upon (Kelly, 2006; Roy et al., 2017).Educational research in mathematics places the role of the teacher, the design of the task, and the learning environment among the most influential ...
Frontiers
Following the closure of schools in the spring 2020 semester due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed two surveys to understand how the pandemic affected elementary education in the U.S. First, we distributed a survey at the end of the spring 2020 semester to understand how school closures impacted delivery of instruction.
PDF Report on the Condition of Education 2021
Report on the Condition of Education 2021. | iii. for educational purposes in September 2020. At the same time, 59 percent of adults reported that computers were provided by the child's school or district, while 4 percent reported that internet access was paid for by the child's school or district.
The Pandemic Has Worsened the Reading Crisis in Schools
March 8, 2022. BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year's reading emergency. As the ...
Slide into Summer! The Astros Foundation and Reliant kick off annual
To reverse this negative impact on a child's education, the Slide into Summer Reading program sets a collective goal of 60,000 reading hours spread throughout summer for elementary students in Greater Houston and surrounding areas. The top 1,000 readers will receive tickets to the August 3 home game to celebrate their summer reading achievements.
Millions of US students are making up little ground after pandemic-era
Students at the Wells Preparatory Elementary School make their way to the cafeteria past reminders of the education and subjects they are receiving on Friday, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. In Chicago Public Schools, the average reading score went up by the equivalent of 70% of a grade level from 2022 to 2023.
A Bipartisan Bill Aims to Boost AI Education for K-12 Teachers
The bill calls on NSF to conduct an outreach campaign on its AI and quantum education opportunities at K-12 schools and post-secondary institutions. "The emerging tech jobs of tomorrow are here ...
The Condition of Education 2020
The Condition of Education 2020 is a congressionally mandated annual report summarizing the latest data from NCES and other sources on education in the United States. This report is designed to help policymakers and the public monitor educational progress. Online Availability: Browse the Condition of Education.
Violence, aggression against educators grew post-pandemic
The task force conducted two surveys in collaboration with national education and related organizations. The results were published in the journal American Psychologist. The study reported on two surveys. The first, conducted during the height of the pandemic (August 2020 to June 2021), asked approximately 15,000 educators and school personnel ...
Moscow
Moscow, city, capital of Russia, located in the far western part of the country.Since it was first mentioned in the chronicles of 1147, Moscow has played a vital role in Russian history. It became the capital of Muscovy (the Grand Principality of Moscow) in the late 13th century; hence, the people of Moscow are known as Muscovites.Today Moscow is not only the political centre of Russia but ...
40 Facts About Elektrostal
In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is ...
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Architecture
The article below describes different aspects of implementation of media-technologies in contemporary architecture. The article focuses more on usage of media facades in high-rise architecture as a very convenient typology of contemporary buildings which can employ LED-screens for creating a new visual...
PDF The Condition of Education 2024 At a Glance
Percentage of public school teachers Who are female Who are male Who held a postbaccalaureate degree Who held a regular teaching certifcate Annual base salary of full-time public school teachers4. 2017-18. 76.5% 23.5% 58.0% 90.4% $65,900. 2020-21.
The Unique Burial of a Child of Early Scythian Time at the Cemetery of
Burial 5 was the most unique, it was found in a coffin made of a larch trunk, with a tightly closed lid. Due to the preservative properties of larch and lack of air access, the coffin contained a well-preserved mummy of a child with an accompanying set of grave goods. The interred individual retained the skin on his face and had a leather ...