Track pandemic recovery by comparing COVID-year student cohorts' gains and achievement gaps against pre-pandemic peers¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 4 claims (2 for, 2 mixed) · 4 studies (4 associational), q1–q3 · 1 of 4 report an effect size · 4 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The brief's analytic approach is to examine "academic gains in the 2022-23 school year relative to pre-pandemic years" and to track "the gap in achievement between the COVID year student group compared to their pre-pandemic peers." This cohort-comparison design lets education agencies quantify recovery progress and express remaining deficits in months of schooling needed to catch up.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Longitudinal achievement data spanning pre-pandemic and post-pandemic school years for comparable student cohorts

Constraints¶

• Interprets recovery at the aggregate level; the available text reports averages rather than subgroup breakdowns

Target Learners¶

• U.S. public school students in grades 3-8

Target Learning Goals¶

• Monitoring academic recovery and quantifying achievement deficits after pandemic disruption

Claims¶

• Post-COVID school recovery varies across schools in both the size of initial achievement declines and the size of subsequent gains [+W]
• The average student needs an estimated 4.1 additional months of schooling to catch up in reading [~W]
• Year 3 students in mid-ICSEA schools achieved two months additional mathematics growth in 2020 compared with 2019 [+W]
• Students with the same absence rates had higher GPAs (and in grades 7-8, higher test scores) in post-pandemic years than pre-pandemic years [~W]

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Karyn Lewis, Megan Kuhfeld. (2023). Education's long COVID: 2022–23 achievement data reveal stalled progress toward pandemic recovery. NWEA Research brief. https://www.nwea.org/research/publication/educations-long-covid-2022-23-achievement-data-reveal-stalled-progress-toward-pandemic-recovery/