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Interestingly, the scores have been in free fall since the pandemic started and cannot be explained by learning loss from lockdowns as the effects are observed even after in school learning has resumed.
One possible explanation is cognitive loss due to covid infections:
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I fully believe that COVID can and does cause brain fog and cognitive loss, but when it comes to test scores, how can learning loss from lockdowns be ruled out as a cause?
Just because in-person learning resumed at some point doesn’t mean that the previous year(s) of remote learning didn’t negatively impact kids. Each school year tends to build on the knowledge taught in the previous school year. If the kids taking the ACT now were freshmen at the start of the pandemic and had to suffer through remote learning for a year or more (I’m not actually sure how long most schools were doing remote), wouldn’t we expect the poorer learning during their early high school years to lead to poorer ACT test scores now?
I suspect that it’s probably a combination of effects from both remote learning and covid brain fog. And I anticipate that we as a society will be feeling the effects of a generally worse off Gen Z for many years to come.
I’m sure it is a combination of many different factors, but the fact that ACT scores are continuing to decline can’t be explained by lockdowns. While there would be loss of learning over that period, you’d expect students who had in class learning to be doing better. So, you’d expect overall performance drop compared to pre covid, but within the covid timeframe there should’ve been some recovery. Allowing covid to run wild was a large scale experiment, and we’re going to be finding out the effects of that for years to come.
Agree we’ll be discovering the effects of covid for many years to come. And again, I’m not saying that covid’s cognitive loss effects have not played any role in lower test scores. I’m sure that they have. But I don’t think we can rule out remote learning as a factor.
Think of education like building a tower out of bricks. Each year of school is a new layer of bricks. Remote learning lays down some, but not all, of a layer of bricks. But we pushed the kids onward to the next school year anyway and started building a new layer of bricks, despite the previous layer being unfinished.
A freshman in high school during 2020 had an unfinished layer 9 and unfinished layer 10. In their junior year, in-person learning resumed full time and started building layer 11. Their teacher even tried catching them up on the missed material from the previous years, shoving some bricks into layers 9 and 10 wherever they could.
Compare that freshman to a student who is 1 year older. They were a sophomore in 2020. They have a finished layer 9, an unfinished layer 10, and an unfinished layer 11.
Both take the ACT at the end of their junior year. If we measure both towers at that point in time, which do you expect to be taller?
Education is sequential. Missing knowledge in an earlier grade will mean that the student will struggle more to catch up in the future. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect test scores to improve just because in-person learning has resumed. There is only so much catching up that students and teachers can do, especially when the foundational layers of knowledge are spotty at best.
Yeah, I agree with all of that. Whether covid has had a significant cognitive impact or not, other factors are clearly playing a role as well. Overall, it’s not looking great unfortunately.
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