Projections suggest major academic impacts from COVID closures for students, especially in mathematics

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As the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic closes schools across the nation, education systems are scrambling to meet the needs of schools, families, and 55.1 million students during these unprecedented times. The economic impacts and trauma of recent events will also have far reaching effects that will likely exacerbate long-standing opportunity gaps. While it is difficult to speculate on what missing months of school may mean for student achievement, research on seasonal learning and summer learning loss can offer some insights that can help educators, policy makers, and families understand, plan for, and address some potential impacts of this extended pause in classroom instruction when students return to school. Seasonal learning research allows researchers to compare student learning patterns when school is in versus out of session. While there is some controversy about the magnitude of summer learning loss, three trends are consistent across seasonal learning research findings:

1. achievement typically slows or declines over the summer months, 
2. declines tend to be steeper for math than for reading, 
3. and the extent (proportionally) of loss increases in the upper grades. 

The degree to which students lose ground during the summer, however, can vary by data source, grade level, and subjecti. Some of the earliest work in seasonal learning suggested that summer slide leads to declines of two to three months of learning over summers,while other research using nationally representative data showed small declines (two weeks of learning), or sometimes even small gains, during the summers following kindergarten and first grade, which researchers described as summer slowdown.

To provide preliminary estimates of the potential impacts of the extended pause of academic instruction during the coronavirus crisis, the authors leverage research on summer loss and use a national sample of over five million students in grades 3–8 who took MAP® Growth™ assessments in 2017–2018.  The authors examined how the observed typical average growth trajectory by grade for students who completed a standardlength school year compares to projections under two scenarios for the closures: a COVID-19 slide, in which students showed patterns of academic setbacks 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 March 15, with school resuming in fall).

 Preliminary COVID slide estimates suggest students will return in fall 2020 with roughly 70% of the learning gains in reading relative to a typical school year. However, in mathematics, students are likely to show much smaller learning gains, returning with less than 50% of the learning gains and in some grades, nearly a full year behind what we would observe in normal conditions.