These data do suggest that schools should focus on supporting students’ math skills, but not at the expense of reading or other subjects, said Christy Hovanetz, a senior policy fellow for accountability and assessment at ExcelinEd, an advocacy group founded by Jeb Bush, Florida’s former governor. (He is also a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the exam.) “One hypothesis … is that research has shown that math is more uniquely influenced by what happens in school,” Martin West, the academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education said in a public briefing. It could be because math is almost exclusively taught in schools, unlike the reading practice kids get on their own at home. It’s hard to know why math seems to be more affected than reading by school disruptions. In math, all students, even those who started the 2020-21 school year on grade level, improved at a slower rate during the pandemic. Īnother study of interim test data found that students who were on grade level in reading at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year stayed on track throughout the spring and fall 2021-but that wasn’t true in math.
Analyses of interim tests given periodically in some classrooms from the 2020-22 school years have found that students are further behind their pre-pandemic peers in math than in reading. These results are in line with other pandemic-era reports on student learning and progress. The drop in math scores was more pervasive, affecting more subgroups across the board. But among some subgroups-students in cities, students in states in the West-they held steady. Reading scores in the long-term trend assessment were mixed: On average, scores fell 5 points. Declines in math were more sweeping than declines in reading-following an established pandemic trend. “One has to ask themselves: ‘recovery,’ what does that mean, to go back to where we were before? I don’t think we want to go back to where we were before … we want to do better,” she said. Instead, he said, we should look to future scores for 13-year-olds, which will present a better sense of how much ground these current students have gained.Īnd Carr emphasized that the goal shouldn’t just be a return to the pre-pandemic status quo, noting that NAEP scores already showed big gaps between higher- and lower-performers before COVID. Most likely, scores for 9-year-olds will be back to normal relatively soon, Reardon said. “The question is: What’s going to happen for these kids over the next years of their lives?”Ĭhildren born now will, hopefully, attend school without the kinds of major, national disruptions that children who were in school during the pandemic faced. “That’s the wrong question,” Reardon said. Researchers, both at NCES and outside of the agency, emphatically say yes.īut will it take another 20 years to raise scores once again? Students scores by 2020 were the result of years of increases, including big jumps during the late 1990s through mid-2000s. It’s easy to ask: Is an average loss of less than 10 points in each case really that big of a deal on a scale of hundreds?
Reading scale scores dropped from 220 to 215 math scores dropped from 241 to 234. “It’s clear that COVID-19 shocked American education and stunted the academic growth of this age group of children,” she said.īut it can be hard to understand exactly what these score declines mean from looking at the numbers alone. Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP, called the score drops “sobering.”
DIGGING DEEPER URINALYSIS STUDENT INFORMATION ANSWERS HOW TO
Here are five key takeaways from the data release, how to make sense of the findings, and what NAEP can-and can’t-illuminate about the effects of the past two years. But NAEP data are notoriously hard to interpret. The results underscore the steep challenge ahead for schools as the 2022-23 year begins.
The declines represent the largest drops in decades. Long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 9-year-old students scored, on average, five points lower in reading and seven points lower in math in 2022 than did their pre-pandemic peers in 2020. Recently, new national data confirmed what educators, parents, and other studies have warned about for months: The pandemic has massively disrupted students’ learning.
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