By Erica Meltzer | Chalkbeat Colorado
COVID disruptions continue to cast a long shadow over student learning, with middle school students in particular suffering the cumulative effects of years of missed lessons, new research shows.
The analysis from the testing group NWEA released Tuesday estimates that eighth graders would need an additional nine months of schooling — an entire school year, essentially — to do as well as their counterparts before the pandemic. Third graders, meanwhile, would need a little more than two months of extra schooling to match their counterparts, according to results from the group’s MAP Growth tests that it administers several times a year.
Across grades and subjects, students continue to perform worse on these tests than similar students did before COVID. And after starting out behind in the fall, they made less progress during the school year than their pre-COVID counterparts, as measured by spring test results. That gap widened an average of 36% in reading and 18% in math over the course of the school year, NWEA found.