Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Students Still Haven't Recovered from COVID Learning Losses; COVID Lockdowns Disrupted a Crucial Social Skill Among Preschoolers, Study Finds, and other C-Virus related stories

Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu | Unsplash
Students still haven't recovered from COVID learning losses:
Despite slight progress in mathematics, students have not yet seen enough academic gains to recover the learning lost during school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the latest release of national test score data.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released its 2024 assessment results on Wednesday, showing some improvement in fourth-grade math but declines in reading comprehension.
“Overall, student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic performance,” said Peggy G. Carr, National Center for Education Statistics commissioner, in a press release. “Where there are signs of recovery, they are mostly in math and largely driven by higher-performing students. Lower-performing students are struggling, especially in reading.”
Fourth-grade students gained two points on the math assessment between 2022 and 2024. There was no difference during that time for eighth-grade math.
However, reading comprehension suffered, according to the NAEP, often called The Nation’s Report Card. The NAEP said the average reading score in both grades was five points lower than in 2019 and two points lower than in 2022.
“In 2024, the percentage of eighth-graders’ reading below NAEP Basic was the largest in the assessment’s history, and the percentage of fourth-graders who scored below NAEP Basic was the largest in 20 years,” the press release said.
The NAEP said that the gap between higher- and lower-performing students continues to increase as higher-performing learners continue to recover and lower-performing students decline or make no progress. --->READ MORE HERE
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COVID lockdowns disrupted a crucial social skill among preschoolers, study finds
Lockdowns. Social distancing. Shuttered schools and businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic and its sweeping disruptions set off a stampede of "what it's doing to us" research, focused largely on schoolchildren. How were students' academics affected? Their mental health? Their social development?
Left unexamined was whether the pandemic impacted the social cognition of preschool children—kids younger than 6—whose social norms were upended by day care closures and families sheltered at home.
That changed when a UC Merced research team, looking at data it had started to gather before the pandemic, discovered children ages 3½ to 5½ tested before and after COVID lockdowns revealed a significant gap in a key cognitive skill, particularly for children from homes with low financial resources and adults with less education.
"It was remarkable to see the drop in kids' performance," said developmental psychology Professor Rose Scott , the lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports . "On one of the tasks in my lab, children tested before the pandemic could pass at 2 and a half years old. Right after the lockdowns, we were seeing 5-year-olds not passing it."
The UC Merced team—including graduate students Gabriel Nguyentran and James Sullivan, who co-authored the study—tested the children for a social cognition skill called false-belief understanding—the ability to recognize other people can be wrong. As a crucial step in distinguishing the mind from reality, false-belief understanding can play a vital role in developing social cooperation, communication and learning.
There were 94 children in the first group tested. Each was given three false-belief tasks. In one task, the child watched as a puppet named Piggy put a toy in one of two containers and left the stage. A second puppet appeared and moved the toy to the other container. Piggy returned. --->READ MORE HERE
Follow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:

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USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates

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NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest

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