A new paper adds to the mounting evidence that school-age children across the globe experienced significant setbacks in their learning progress during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Students “lost out on about 35% of a normal school year’s worth of learning” when in-person learning stopped during the public health crisis, according to a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. The school closures were intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus, but the new paper suggests that learning deficits emerged and persisted over time. The paper included data from 15 different countries.
“Schoolchildren’s learning progress slowed down substantially during the pandemic. So on average, children lost out on about one-third of what they would have usually learned in a normal school year, and these learning deficits arose quite early in the pandemic,” said Bastian Betthäuser, an author of the paper and researcher at the Sciences Po Centre for Research on Social Inequalities in France and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
“Children still have not recovered the learning that they lost out on at the start of the pandemic,” he said. Also, “education inequality between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds increased during the pandemic. So the learning crisis is an equality crisis. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds were disproportionately affected by school closures.”
The researchers reviewed and analyzed data from 42 studies on learning progress during the pandemic across 15 countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the United States. The studies were published between March 2020 and August 2022. The researchers conducted an initial search for the studies in April 2021 and additional searches in February and August 2022.