Major Academic Impacts from COVID-19 Closures for Students, Especially in Math

NWEA, a not-for-profit provider of assessment solutions, released today projections that current school closures due to the COVID-19 global pandemic could result in substantially lower achievement levels for students. The forecasts leveraged previous NWEA research on summer learning loss (also known as summer slide) and used a national sample of over five million students in grades 3-8 who took MAP® Growth™ assessments to estimate potential impacts of the COVID-19 related school closures.

The research compared academic achievement trajectories during a typical school year for grades 3 – 8 where no disruption to learning took place, to two scenarios for the closure: a COVID-19 slide, in which students showed patterns of learning loss typical of summers throughout an extended closure, and COVID-19 slowdown, in which students maintained the same level of academic achievement they had when schools were closed (modeled for simplicity as beginning March 15) until schools reopened.

Preliminary estimates suggest impacts may be larger in mathematics than in reading, and that students may return in fall 2020 with less than 50% of typical learning gains, and in some grades, nearly a full year behind what we would expect in this subject under normal conditions.