Abstract
Following the closure of schools in the spring 2020 semester due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed two surveys to understand how the pandemic affected elementary education in the U.S. First, we distributed a survey at the end of the spring 2020 semester to understand how school closures impacted delivery of instruction. Second, we conducted a follow up survey in November 2020 to determine the nature of instruction provided to students when schools did or did not re-open in Fall 2020 and understand teachers’ perceptions of student learning and achievement during the pandemic. Each survey was sent to a sample of over 9,000 teachers who were randomly selected to be representative of the population of the U.S. Results indicated that many students did not receive direct instruction in academic skills during the spring 2020 semester. Although by late fall 2020 teachers reported broad use of some form of in-person instructional model, teachers indicated that many of their students were not ready to transition to the next grade level and that achievement gaps were larger in fall 2020 than in typical years. These findings have important implications for practices during potential school closures in the future.
Highlights
The current COVID-19 crisis has presented unique challenges to education professionals across the U.S for identifying optimal strategies to promote student achievement
In a model that addressed the likely scenario that students from high socioeconomic status (SES) schools would receive more remote instruction than would students from low SES schools, SES-based achievement gaps in mathematics and reading were projected to be larger at the beginning of fall 2020 than they would be in a typical school year
Given that this was the beginning of the pandemic and the first time many teachers engaged in remote instruction, our research questions for Survey 1 focused on characterizing the nature of remote instruction at that time, including how it varied across student populations and demographics
Summary
The current COVID-19 crisis has presented unique challenges to education professionals across the U.S for identifying optimal strategies to promote student achievement It is well-documented that school attendance is associated with achievement (Morrissey et al, 2014), and periods of time during which students do not attend school (e.g., summer) result in minimal progress or declines in achievement. State departments of education and school districts temporarily closed schools in spring 2020 and some districts made substantial modifications to the 2020–2021 school year, such as in-person/remote hybrid instruction or 100% remote instruction (Hobbs, 2020) Projections of how such closures and changes in delivery of instruction would impact student achievement suggested that students would have significantly lower reading and mathematics abilities when beginning the fall 2020 academic year compared with previous years, (Kuhfeld et al, 2020). In a model that addressed the likely scenario that students from high socioeconomic status (SES) schools would receive more remote instruction than would students from low SES schools, SES-based achievement gaps in mathematics and reading were projected to be larger at the beginning of fall 2020 than they would be in a typical school year
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