effect of covid 19 on student academic performance essay

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

The perceived impact of covid-19 on student well-being and the mediating role of the university support: evidence from france, germany, russia, and the uk.

• 1 Department of Management, HSE University, Moscow, Russia
• 2 Department of Management, Kedge Business School, Talence, France
• 3 Department of Management, Kedge Business School, Marseille, France
• 4 Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, United Kingdom
• 5 Department Business and Economics, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Berlin, Germany

The rapid and unplanned change to teaching and learning in the online format brought by COVID-19 has likely impacted many, if not all, aspects of university students' lives worldwide. To contribute to the investigation of this change, this study focuses on the impact of the pandemic on student well-being, which has been found to be as important to student lifelong success as their academic achievement. Student well-being has been linked to their engagement and performance in curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities, intrinsic motivation, satisfaction, meaning making, and mental health. The purpose of this study was to examine how student perceptions of their degree completion and future job prospects during the pandemic impact their well-being and what role university support plays in this relationship. We used the conservation of resources theory to frame our study and to develop five hypotheses that were later tested via structural equation modeling. Data were collected from 2,707 university students in France, Germany, Russia, and UK via an online survey. The results showed that university support provided by instructors and administration plays a mediating role in the relationship between the perceived impact of COVID-19 on degree completion and future job prospects and levels of student well-being. Student well-being is decreased by their concerns for their degree completion but not by their concerns for future job prospects. In turn, concerns for future job prospects affect student well-being over time. These results suggest that in a “new normal,” universities could increase student well-being by making support to student studies a priority, especially for undergraduates. Also, universities should be aware of the students' changing emotional responses to crisis and ensure visibility and accessibility of student support.

Introduction

Student well-being has become a concern for many colleges and universities globally as they acknowledge the importance of a balance between psychological, social, emotional, and physical aspects of student lives (e.g., Flinchbaugh et al., 2012 ; Mahatmya et al., 2018 ). Student well-being could be understood as “reduction in stress, enhanced experienced meaning and engagement in the classroom, and ultimately, heightened satisfaction with life” ( Flinchbaugh et al., 2012 , p. 191). Student well-being includes concepts of motivation, identity, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and self-regulation in the context of learning and matriculating through the program to get a degree ( Willis et al., 2019 ). Student well-being has shown to increase their engagement in learning activities, meaning making, a sense of belonging, positive relationships with others, autonomy, and competencies ( Sortheix and Lönnqvist, 2015 ; Baik et al., 2016 ; Cox and Brewster, 2020 ) and reduce their burn-out, stress, frustration, dissatisfaction, and withdrawal from active learning ( Flinchbaugh et al., 2012 ; Mokgele and Rothman, 2014 ; Yazici et al., 2016 ). Therefore, well-being not only fosters student academic achievement, but also prepares students for lifelong success ( Mahatmya et al., 2018 ). Not surprisingly, many universities across the globe have decided to make well-being their central strategic goal. For example, in Europe, seven universities from seven different regions along with over 100 partnering organizations formed the European University of Well-Being—EUniWell—to promote well-being of students, staff, and communities. Meanwhile, Schools for Health in Europe Network Foundation (2019) is working on health and well-being standards and indicators that offer guidelines to promote health in schools in Europe. In the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Policy Institute (2019) and Advance Higher Education work together to monitor student well-being by continuously collecting and analyzing data from full-time undergraduate students. In the United States, George Mason University, VA, has implemented a university-wide “Well-Being University Initiative” that is coordinated and advanced by a specially created center. The University System of Georgia, USA, has adopted a similar vision of a well-being culture to enhance lives of its community.

Prior to the pandemic, levels of well-being among college students were troublesome ( Poots and Cassidy, 2020 ). For example, in the United States, only one in 10 students graduating from universities measured high in all elements of well-being ( Gallup, 2020 ). In the United Kingdom, undergraduates were reported to have lower well-being than the general population and their well-being was in decline for several years ( Higher Education Policy Institute, 2019 ). This unfortunate state of well-being among students undoubtedly has been devastated by the pandemic that has brought suffering, frustration, discomfort, fear, loss, and other negative emotions and experiences. Students across the world have suddenly been expected to work and learn online, which requires access to good IT infrastructure and equipment, connectivity, and different digital and cognitive skills. Students worry not only about the infection risk but also about their degree completion and unemployment upon graduation, which impacted their well-being even prior to the pandemic ( Moate et al., 2019 ).

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, research has shown the psychological impact of the pandemic on university students and discussed the coping solutions. For instance, disruptions in academic processes due to Covid-19 pandemic have increased student anxiety ( Wang et al., 2020 ), especially for those without adequate social support ( Cao et al., 2020 ). Other health risks, such as depression, alcohol and drug consumption, and eating disorder symptoms, have been reported among German university students ( Kohls et al., 2020 ). Consequently, students with lower levels of mental well-being experience more stress about their academic activities and decreased self-efficacy, satisfaction with coursework, and sense of belonging to university ( Capone et al., 2020 ). Stress also has been found to decrease medical students' enthusiasm to learn and practice medicine upon graduation ( Ye et al., 2020 ). The pandemic has also increased student workload, uncertainty about the semester completion, and confusion about study expectations, which resulted in higher stress levels ( Stathopoulou et al., 2020 ; Van de Velde et al., 2020 ). Due to the limited social life during the pandemic, these students have also reported feeling lonely, anxious, and depressed ( Essadek and Rabeyron, 2020 ). Prior studies highlighted some coping solutions; for example, students searching for information about the pandemic ( Capone et al., 2020 ; Wathelet et al., 2020 ) and for meaning in life ( Arslan et al., 2020 ) have higher levels of mental well-being. Students who spend much time on social media platforms and have strong motivation for online learning also report lower levels of distress ( Al-Tammemi et al., 2020 ). Surprisingly, Capone et al. (2020) found no significant deviation in levels of stress and mental well-being from the accepted norm among college students in Italy.

These and other researchers (e.g., Li et al., 2020 ; Zhai and Du, 2020 ) call for better understanding of the impact of COVID-19 on student psychological states. First, colleges and universities across the globe need to identify and adopt strategies and resources to address the impact of COVID-19, which is likely to be long lasting. These strategies would include a revision of the existing practices and interventions at the curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular levels (e.g., Yamada and Victor, 2012 ; Maybury, 2013 ; Kareem and Bing, 2014 ; Mokgele and Rothman, 2014 ) and at the university-wide level ( Mahatmya et al., 2018 ). Second, COVID-19 has created much uncertainty about “a new normal” in student learning and university functioning. Currently, when most countries are still responding to the pandemic, it seems possible, if not likely, that the change to online or hybrid modes of learning will become more prevalent in colleges and universities across the globe. Therefore, new strategies and resources need to be developed to improve student well-being in the online or hybrid environment. Third, to find effective strategies and resources, colleges, and universities have to identify and understand factors and mechanisms through, which COVID-19 affects student well-being. Consequently, this study sought to examine how student perceptions of their degree completion and future job prospects during the pandemic impact their well-being and what role university support plays in this relationship. To achieve this goal, the study used four scales to collect self-reported data from students in four countries, such as France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom (UK).

Our research contributions are three-fold. First, the study contributes to the emergent knowledgebase of the impact of COVID-19 on student well-being in general (e.g., Al-Tammemi et al., 2020 ; Capone et al., 2020 ; Li et al., 2020 ) and student well-being in France, Germany, Russia and UK in particular (e.g., Essadek and Rabeyron, 2020 ; Kohls et al., 2020 ; Savage et al., 2020 ). Our findings could contribute to the research on the impact of COVID-19 on students and help the higher education sector internationally develop appropriate strategies. Second, this study identifies the key factors affecting students and their learning during the lockdown period and helps understand adjustments needed for the “new normal” learning environment. We argue that the change to an online or hybrid mode of learning will be the “new normal” for teaching, and, hence, we need to explore and find evidence for students to effectively deal with and learn in an online and hybrid environment. Third, using the conservation of resources theory (CoR; Hobfoll, 1988 , 1989 ), we enrich the application of prior student well-being research and provide a theoretical framework that helps understand the mechanism of university support on student well-being.

In the following sections, we introduce the concept of student well-being, provide an overview of the CoR theory ( Hobfoll, 1988 , 1989 ), and review resources that universities provide to enhance student well-being. Then we develop hypotheses, describe the study methodology, and present the results and discussion. We conclude with research limitations and future research direction.

Theoretical Background and Hypotheses Development

Conservation of resources theory.

The CoR theory ( Hobfoll, 1988 , 1989 ) suggests that people experience stress when they feel the threat of resource loss, a real net loss of resources, and/or a lack of gained resources after resource investment. Two types of resources are examined by this theory. On the one hand, individuals' external resources are object resources (e.g., for university student, laptop for taking online courses, living expenses), social resources (e.g., family help), and condition resources (e.g., stable internet and digital support offered by the university). On the other hand, individuals' internal resource includes personal resources (e.g., self-efficacy and self-control during distance learning) and energy resources (e.g., time and health; Chen et al., 2015 ; Hagger, 2015 ). The CoR theory is relevant to better understand the impacts of Covid-19 on university students' well-being as they need to follow fully or partially online courses, they are forced to reduce the social activities to the minimum level, and they should try to manage daily life in the new normal. Simultaneously, Covid-19 remains an international threat to both life and economies, resulting in widespread public nervousness This continuing global pandemic concurrent with the changes in university life are likely to decrease student well-being.

Applying the CoR theory to the current pandemic, Ojo et al. (2020) found that individual reaction and subsequent response to the crisis varies. Some people can bounce back easily and shortly ( Luthans et al., 2006 ; Malik and Garg, 2020 ) while some people will develop the symptoms such as depression or other psychiatric disorders. University students who are able to optimize the resource gains, cope with changes in daily life, and manage their emotions are more likely to perceive the crisis positively. This in turn not only shows their current level of resilience but additionally enables them to develop their resilience capability. Within this dynamic process, their resilience has served to reduce the stress ( Vinkers et al., 2020 ). In this vein, while students are balancing the resource gains (e.g., university support) and resource loss (e.g., change-related stressors), they show different levels of resilience and which affect their capability to maintain well-being.

Student Well-Being

Some researchers explain well-being in terms of equilibrium by stating that everybody has a baseline of happiness. According to Headey and Wearing (1991) , resources, psychic incomes, and subjective well-being are in a dynamic equilibrium. This equilibrium comprises “physical well-being, plenty of physical resources; absence of fatigue; psychological well-being and evenness of temper; freedom of movement and effectiveness in action; good relations with other people” ( Herzlich, 1974 , p. 60). From this perspective, well-being could be defined as the balance point between an individual's resource pool and the challenges faced ( Dodge et al., 2012 ; Chen et al., 2015 ).

During their program completion under the impacts of COVID-19, students face numerous challenges, demands, and turbulences that influence their well-being. For example, they experience diverse social and economic pressures ( Wood et al., 2018 ), have to balance their education, family, and work responsibilities ( Moate et al., 2019 ), and encounter social isolation, discrimination, language barriers, and cross-cultural differences ( Daddow et al., 2019 ). To successfully address these demands and succeed in their pursuit of education and a profession, students at all levels of education and across all disciplines have to have timely and adequate resources ( Mokgele and Rothman, 2014 ; Wood et al., 2018 ). These resources help to address students' needs and, hence, reduce their burn-out and stress and increase their engagement in learning activities, meaning making, and life satisfaction ( Flinchbaugh et al., 2012 ).

Universities can deploy these resources via curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities ( Flinchbaugh et al., 2012 ; Yamada and Victor, 2012 ; Maybury, 2013 ). In the classroom, clear assessment criteria, classroom policies, and project deadlines can eliminate student frustration, dissatisfaction, and withdrawal from active learning ( Mokgele and Rothman, 2014 ). Sports and physical activity have also been shown to decrease depression and stress and increase student well-being ( Yazici et al., 2016 ). Campus libraries contribute to promoting student well-being by ensuring easy access to learning resources and a learning space for all students ( Cox and Brewster, 2020 ). These practices can also help students to increase intrinsic motivation to learn, voice their concerns, enact their identities, and make sense of their experiences. In contrast, a campus environment that does not efficiently address unhealthy and unethical social interactions, for example, bullying ( Chen and Huang, 2015 ), cyberbullying ( Musharraf and Anis-ul-Haque, 2018 ), and cyber dating abuse ( Viillora et al., 2020 ) increases student depression and anxiety and decreases student quality of life. This can lead to students starting to feel less happy and less intrinsically motivated to learn, which affects their well-being.

The Perceived Impact of COVID-19 on Degree Completion and Student Well-Being

During COVID-19, more than 100 countries implemented either nationwide or local “lock-down” measures at least once. Such closures meant that face-to-face courses have been transitioned to online learning ( Kwok et al., 2020 ). The impact of COVID-19 on student life becomes significant. These can be, for example, experiencing more workload, adapting oneself to an online learning mode immediately, or moving back to home without sufficient preparation but can also include more worries due to uncertainty and fear of pandemic. In addition, the impact of COVID-19 on each student varies. Some students have limited access to connectivity; some do not have adequate IT equipment to attend online classes, and others cannot afford the extra cost to improve their IT resources ( UNESCO, 2020 ). Meanwhile, students' subjective socioeconomic loss affects their life outcomes. In their study, Kohls et al. (2020) argue that income changes during the pandemic affect the levels of depressive symptoms. In other words, socioeconomic loss leads to increasing stress. For instance, many students rely on part-time jobs to gain their living expenses, and due to the lockdown and economic crisis, they either cannot get a renewed contract or they become unemployed. Unemployment leads not only to earning loss, but also to psychosocial asset loss, social withdrawal, and psychological and physical well-being loss ( Brand, 2015 ). All in all, the unavailable external resources can impact the student learning experience, for example, interrupted learning, lack of participation in in-class discussion, absenteeism in class, and restraints to taking their final exams, all of which can result in students accepting lower-status jobs in order to survive. Additionally, some students have also faced discrimination ( Hardinges, 2020 ) during COVID-19, which may lead to mental health problems ( Kang et al., 2020 ). Students from minority groups (e.g., Asian students, in particular the Chinese) have encountered social isolation and stereotypes, which could impact their student experience and job prospects.

Furthermore, the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the world has been substantial. With insufficient knowledge of the virus and no available vaccine for months, students may be prone to develop more negative emotions. Prior studies have shown that negative emotions have a critical impact on well-being ( Gross, 2015 ; Puente-Martínez et al., 2018 ). Students may experience real and potential loss of resources and a mismatch between task demand at the universities and their resource availability ( Hagger, 2015 ). With the increasing negative emotions, their well-being could be affected as they become more concerned about the impact of COVID-19 on their studies.

We, therefore, predict that COVID-19 would lead to students' negative well-being because students may experience more stress related to uncertainties in their academic success, negative economic impact, and lack of perceived support ( Cao et al., 2020 ). Meanwhile, students would feel the need to deploy more time and energy to protect themselves against and recover from resource loss ( Hobfoll et al., 2018 ) in order to avoid putting their well-being at risk. We propose the following hypothesis:

H1: The perceived impact of COVID-19 on student concerns for degree completion will negatively predict levels of student well-being.

The Perceived Impact of COVID-19 on Student Concerns for Future Job Prospects and Student Well-Being

COVID-19 has triggered a worldwide economic recession ( OECD, 2020 ). With the lockdown measures implemented by many governments, business opportunities become restricted in many sectors and unemployment is rising. Many companies have reported layoffs. As predicted during the first wave of the pandemic by OECD (2020) , the second wave of infections in late 2020 worsened the economic situation, and more companies suffered from the economic crisis, which has impacted job losses, financial well-being, and standards of living. As a result, students search for job opportunities to ensure their return on education investment would be limited. Thus, there are more job demands than supply. According to the CoR theory, when resources are lost or perceived to be threatened, people experience stress and are motivated to gain back their resources ( Baer et al., 2018 ). Under the economic lockdown and recession, more students may have difficulties in finding jobs and/or internships, which could negatively affect students' self-esteem (personal resource) and their individual economic well-being (object resource) for instance. Without a guarantee to job prospects, students feel more stressed about their future and return on education investment, which decreases their engagement in learning activities and increases their negative emotions ( Flinchbaugh et al., 2012 ). Therefore, the more concerned students feel about the impact of COVID-19 on their future job prospects, the lower their level of well-being and the higher the level of negative affect. We suggest the second hypothesis:

H2: The perceived impact of COVID-19 on student concerns for future job prospects will negatively predict levels of student well-being.

The Mediating Role of University Support

Universities play an important role in ensuring and increasing student well-being. In the classroom, specific interventions, including positive psychology assignments ( Maybury, 2013 ), stress management and journaling ( Flinchbaugh et al., 2012 ), and mindful awareness practices ( Yamada and Victor, 2012 ) have been shown to improve student well-being. A supportive and enabling environment on campus has been proved to ensure student well-being ( Kareem and Bing, 2014 ; Daddow et al., 2019 ) by fostering their sense of belonging, positive relationships with others, autonomy, and competencies ( Baik et al., 2016 ). For example, through informal social interactions students explore and relate to individual, group, and even the entire university values, which increases their well-being ( Sortheix and Lönnqvist, 2015 ). Mahatmya et al. (2018) describe a set of integrated and interrelated courses that incorporate both traditional and experiential learning activities for undergraduate students. To monitor and manage student well-being outside the classroom, universities provide other services and interventions, including, for example, stress management ( Mokgele and Rothman, 2014 ), counseling ( Kareem and Bing, 2014 ), inter-faith, and cultural diversity programs ( Daddow et al., 2019 ). In summary, these services and interventions represent the support that students can access and, therefore, can make students feel more positive about their resource gains. The perceived impact of COVID-19 may result in students perceiving university support to be limited, insufficient, or non-existent. Therefore, students would need extra resources to achieve the university success and increase their well-being. Therefore, we propose the following hypothesis:

H3a: University support will mediate the relationship between the perceived impact of COVID-19 on student concerns for degree completion and levels of student well-being.

Similarly, students need support from their universities to increase their chances of employment before and upon graduation ( McMurray et al., 2016 ; Donald et al., 2018 ). These are activities and initiatives provided by academic and student services, campus libraries and student organizations to help students cope with the study demands, develop professional networks, practice job interview skills, write resumes, and gain internships. However, COVID-19 has greatly impacted these resource offering. For example, career services would typically provide more support in a face-to-face format (e.g., career fairs and case championships), but now universities may face difficulties (e.g., time, money, and available talent) to develop effective comparable online services. If universities help students find jobs and internships, students could feel supported, less stressed, and more optimistic about their future careers. Hence, we propose the following hypothesis:

H3b: University support will mediate the relationship between the perceived impact of COVID-19 on student concerns for future job prospects and levels of student well-being.

Methodology

Sample and procedure.

The sample was collected from university students in France, Germany, Russia, and UK between April and June, 2020. In total, 2,707 questionnaires were collected. However, 765 had missing values; after removing them, 1,932 observations were included for further analysis. Out of these 1,932 participants, 119 were recruited from UK, 227 from Russia, 1,314 from Germany, and 272 from France (see Table 1 ). From the students in the sample 63.8% were female, 35.8% male, and 0.4% other. The mean age was 22.87 years old. Most students lived at home (68.5%) and studied full-time (85.1%). Over half of the respondents were first- and second-year undergraduate students.

Table 1 . Demographics.

The questionnaire was administered with Qualtrics XM software. Participants received the link and filled in the questionnaire individually, voluntarily, and anonymously. The project followed ethical standards of research required by each participating university.

The first part of the self-reported questionnaire consisted of demographic details such as gender, age, country, place of residence, study mode, and study year. The main part of the questionnaire included the following four scales.

University Support

University support was measured by asking students to rate to which extent they got support from their lecturers and universities. Two items reflected university support and were measured on a 5-point Likert scale (e.g., Please rate these as they apply to your current experience: I get support that I need from the following:—My lecturers). This was based on the social support scale developed by Pierce et al. (1991) . Good internal consistency was achieved (α = 0.72).

Well-being can be conceptualized as having such components as valence and intensity ( Warr, 2003 ). Therefore, two scales were used to capture well-being in different states: in the moment and general.

In the Moment Well-Being

To test the valence of student well-being in response to predictors, it is important to represent well-being in terms of independent dimensions of positive and negative emotional states ( Tellegen et al., 1999 ). In the moment well-being was measured by a 5-point Likert scale developed and validated by Russell and Daniels (2018) . This scale helps to measure specific positive and negative emotional states relevant to a particular event in time, or “right now.” This ensures affect is measured at its lowest level in terms of duration demonstrating a specific emotional response ( Frijda, 1993 ). Examples of positive states include happy, motivated, and active; examples of negative states include anxious, annoyed, and tired. Good internal consistency was found for negative (α = 0.70) and positive (α = 0.79) dimensions.

General Positive Well-Being

To draw comprehensive conclusions as to the effects of predictors on student well-being, it is necessary to also use a summative circumplex model of well-being ( Feldman Barrett and Russell, 1998 ). This measures the second level of mood-based affect that is not directly anchored to an event and, therefore, at a different intensity to momentary affect ( Brief and Weiss, 2002 ). General positive well-being was measured with World Health Organization (1998) 5-point Likert scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” This scale helps to assess student mood-based affect for the past 2 weeks. A sample item is “I have felt cheerful and in good spirits and I have felt calm and relaxed.” Good internal consistency was found (α = 0.84).

Student Concerns

This scale was devised to assess participants' concerns about the impact of COVID-19 on the basis of seven items. The items were rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “not at all stressed” to “extremely concerned.” Varimax orthogonal rotation with Kaiser normalization was used for factor analysis extraction. All factors with eigenvalue >1, explaining 60% of the variance, were considered for further analysis. Coefficients smaller than 0.5 were excluded to get a reasonable number of factors with larger share of variance ( Field, 2009 ). Adequacy of sample size measured by KMO and Bartlett's test of sphericity established a test score of 0.818 ( p < 0.001). Communalities for variables taken for analysis were >0.5. Based on the dimension reduction technique, two latent variables were found to account for 77.38%, so the following two subscales were identified:

Concerns for degree completion measured the perceived effect of COVID-19 on student ability to complete their degree and meet academic expectation. The following four items comprised the subscale: “my exams and assessments,” “my ability to complete my course,” “my final degree/course qualification grade,” and “my grades.” This subscale had a good internal consistency (α = 0.89).

Concerns for future job prospects measured the perceived effect of COVID-19 on student ability to become employed upon graduation. These three items comprised the subscale: “my employability,” “the wider economy,” and “job prospects.” This subscale had a good internal consistency (α = 0.86).

Data Analysis

The Statistical Package for Social Sciences software version (26) with AMOS was used to analyze the data. Descriptive analysis was used to determine means, standard deviations, confidence intervals, skewness, and correlations among the six main variables (see Table 2 ).

Table 2 . Descriptive statistics, correlations, and reliability coefficients.

Since the purpose of this study was to understand the antecedents of well-being, a path analysis was performed by employing structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation method. The use of structural equation modeling in social science and education when testing mediation is recommended as it allows to test multiple pathways to assess the viability of the hypothesized model ( Wu and Zumbo, 2007 ).

The study was exploratory; therefore, two types of university concerns served as independent variables: support from university as a mediating variable and general well-being together with either negative or positive in the moment well-being as the dependent variables. To determine model fit, we applied two types of fit indices: absolute fit measures (χ 2 , RMSEA, AGFI) and incremental fit measures [NFI, NNFI (TLI), CFI; Hooper et al., 2008 ]. Chi-square (χ 2 ) in the range between 2.0 and 5.0 and the probability level with insignificant p -value ( p > 0.05) were acceptable for threshold levels. The root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) in the range of 0.03–0.08 provides a good fit. Values >0.95 were suitable for the adjusted goodness-of-fit statistic (AGFI), normed-fit index (NFI), Tucker-Lewis index in AMOS (TLI) or non-normed fit index in EQS (NNFI), and comparative fit index (CFI; Hooper et al., 2008 ).

First, path analysis was run to further evaluate the relationships between student concerns for degree completion and future job prospects, university support, general well-being, and negative in the moment well-being. Path analysis was also used to test the mediation model in terms of overall fit. The model shows satisfying results with the following model fit statistics: p = 0.089, χ 2 = 2.901, RMSEA = 0.031, AGFI = 0.991, NFI = 0.999, NNFI (TLI) = 0.991, CFI = 0.999, and path coefficients presented in Figure 1 .

Figure 1 . Path analysis with negative in the moment well-being.

Second, similar analysis was performed to explore the relationships between student concerns, university support, general well-being, and positive in the moment well-being. This model demonstrates the following statistics: p = 0.055, χ 2 = 3.677, RMSEA = 0.037, AGFI = 0.989, NFI = 0.999, NNFI (TLI) = 0.990, CFI = 0.999 (see Figure 2 ).

Figure 2 . Path analysis with positive in the moment well-being.

All coefficients were significant beyond 0.05 level. The analyses of direct, indirect and total effects of student concerns on general well-being and both negative and positive in the moment well-being are shown in Tables 3 , 4 , respectively.

Table 3 . Direct, indirect, and total effects of student concerns on general well-being.

Table 4 . Direct, indirect, and total effects of student concerns on in the moment well-being.

The Perceived Impact of COVID-19 on Student Concerns for Degree Completion and Student Well-Being

The direct effect of student concerns for degree completion on general well-being and positive in the moment well-being is significant and negative (−0.18 and −0.40, respectively). However, when we consider negative in the moment well-being, concerns for degree completion had negative direct effect on general well-being (−0.26) and positive in the moment well-being (0.37). Moreover, the analysis of indirect effects demonstrates that university support mediates the effect of concerns for degree completion on general well-being (−0.31) and positive in the moment well-being (−0.07). In the same way, this construct influences negative in the moment well-being affect (0.05) and general well-being (−0.23). These results suggest that the perceived impact of COVID-19 on concerns for degree completion has a significant negative effect on student well-being while university support plays a mediating role between these two variables, therefore fully supporting H1and H3a.

The Perceived Impact of COVID-19 on Future Job Prospects and Student Well-Being

Concerns about the impact of COVID-19 on future job prospects have a direct effect on general well-being, which is significant and negative (−0.06), together with positive in the moment well-being and a significant positive effect on negative in the moment well-being (0.133). These results suggest that increased levels of concerns about the effect of COVID-19 on future job prospects leads to lower levels of general well-being and higher levels of negative in the moment well-being. Therefore, H2 is partially supported. Furthermore, university support attenuates the effect of concerns about future job prospects on negative in the moment well-being (−0.013) ( Table 4 ). These results support H3b, thereby suggesting university support has a beneficial effect on student well-being.

Regarding the future job prospects, degree completion, and well-being, we ran the analysis of variation (ANOVA) to understand the differences between undergraduates ( n = 1,625) and post-graduates ( n = 288) separately. Post-graduates did not show any significant differences regarding degree completion [ F (1, 286) = 0.065, p = 0.798], future job prospects [ F (1, 286) = 0.585, p = 0.445], and general well-being [ F (1, 286) = 0.626, p = 0.430]. However, significant differences between the undergraduate groups were observed for all three variables, namely, concerns for degree completion [ F (4, 1, 620) = 7.77, p < 0.001], future job prospects [ F (4, 1, 620) = 30.2, p < 0.001], and general well-being [ F (4, 1, 620 ) = 4.99, p < 0.001]. Then, a year-by-year comparison analysis was performed by applying Tukey's honestly significant difference test to examine how this is impacted by the year of study. As a result, first-year undergraduates (3.34 ± 1.09 min) expressed significantly higher levels of concerns for degree completion than third- (2.99 ± 1.17 min, p < 0.001) and fourth-year (2.98 ± 1.29 min, p = 0.01) students. Similarly, second-year undergraduates (3.34 ± 1.12 min) expressed significantly higher levels of concerns for degree completion than third- (2.99 ± 1.17 min, p < 0.001) and fourth-year (2.98 ± 1.29 min, p = 0.01) students. However, the findings were opposite when we compared the future job prospects means between years of study. The fourth-year students (3.76 ± 1.18 min) demonstrated higher significant concerns in comparison with other undergraduate groups, namely first-year (2.71 ± 1.12 min, p < 0.001), second-year (2.89 ± 1.25 min, p < 0.001), and even third-year (3.33 ± 1.26 min, p = 0.007) as well as those who study abroad or through placement programs (3.31 ± 1.15 min, p = 0.016). As for general well-being, the most optimistic group was undergraduates who participated in placement programs or studied abroad. These respondents expressed significantly higher levels regarding general well-being over the past week (3.09 ± 0.93 min) than first-year (2.84 ± 0.92 min, p = 0.039) and second-year (2.72 ± 0.97 min, p < 0.001) students. However, there were no statistically significant differences between placement/study abroad undergraduates and third-year (2.85 ± 0.94 min, p = 0.095) and fourth-year (2.93 ± 0.92 min, p = 0.641) students.

The purpose of this study was to examine how student perceptions of their degree completion and future job prospects during the pandemic impact their well-being and what role university support plays in this relationship. We developed and tested the relationship between the perceived impact of COVID-19, university support, and student well-being. Our results showed that the perceived impact of COVID-19 on student concerns for degree completion negatively predicts levels of student well-being. In other words, the more worried students are about the impact of COVID-19 on their studies, the more their levels of well-being decrease. This result is in line with the findings of Poots and Cassidy (2020) who found support to be a positive predictor of well-being and a significantly negative relationship between academic stress and support. COVID-19 disrupted the balance point between the students' resource pool relevant to their academic pursuits and the numerous challenges they face ( Dodge et al., 2012 ). Programs, processes, and services have gone online leading to student poor well-being. Therefore, the impact of the pandemic, and similar crises, extends beyond student perceptions of their success in their main role as students but also to their perceptions of happiness ( Pollard and Lee, 2003 ), life satisfaction ( Diener and Diener, 1996 ), and being intensely alive and authentic ( Ryan and Deci, 2001 ).

Also, the results revealed that the relationship between the perceived impact of COVID-19 on student concerns for degree completion and levels of student well-being is mediated by university support. This result illustrates the importance of university support on student perceptions and emotional states, including stress, meaning making, and life satisfaction ( Flinchbaugh et al., 2012 ). This university support represents a resource that is outside of individuals ( Hobfoll et al., 2018 ). When this support is timely and adequate ( Mokgele and Rothman, 2014 ; Wood et al., 2018 ), students can successfully deal with the demands of their educational pursuits. However, the study also indicates that when students perceive the negative impact of COVID-19 on their degree completion and well-being, they are less likely to perceive their university as supportive. We explain this situation with the different perceptions in effective support. Students and universities have differences in their views about which priorities support well-being ( Graham et al., 2016 ). Students perceive university support as valuable and effective when they can obtain lecturers' timely feedback to their emails, transparent, and fast communication in relation to the changes from the COVID-19 situation, dynamic online courses, and emergency financial support amongst other factors. Students are becoming more exigent on the resources that universities could offer to support their academic success and how efficiently the support is delivered. From the university perspective, they need to develop solutions that are in line with institutional or governmental measures, but little concrete information exists. Universities may find it difficult to cope with changes related to COVID-19 immediately (e.g., adopt fully online learning environments whilst not all the lecturers have the capabilities or facilities to teach online). Therefore, students perceive that university support is not sufficient to their academic success while universities have already made great efforts to ensure online learning and working-from-home policies. Given that students' immediate priority is their academic performance, they are trying to gain more educational resources than universities may be able to offer. Students, therefore, may perceive their university support as insufficient to their degree completion. This could also be explained by one of the principles of the CoR theory that states that resource loss is disproportionately more prominent than resource gain ( Hobfoll et al., 2018 ). Therefore, students seem to be very sensitive to a lack of or very little immediate and long-term university support to their academic success.

The study also found unexpected results related to the student perceptions of their future job prospects. First, there is no direct relationship between the perceived impact of COVID-19 on future job prospects and student well-being. In other words, student concerns about the impact of COVID-19 on their future job prospects does not decrease their level of well-being. This result needs further research. It is possible to suggest that students do not see an immediate threat because job prospects are about the future ( Xu et al., 2015 ). For instance, students that are not in their final academic year could feel less of a threat of resource loss in terms of future employment. Instead, they are more stressed and concerned about the impact of the pandemic on their degree completion that is more urgent at the moment. Interestingly, students who are more stressed about the impact of COVID-19 on their future job prospects are more likely to perceive their university as giving higher levels of support. As fewer employment opportunities exist in the labor market, students expect university networks to offer them some potential job opportunities.

The study also showed that students at different levels of education perceived the impact of the pandemic in different ways. The most vulnerable group was undergraduates who expressed significantly higher levels of concerns for degree completion. Perhaps, due to the uncertainty related to the duration of lockdowns, social distance measures, and other restrictions as well as vaccine effectiveness and availability, first year students struggled to see how they are able to complete their program the most. They also have fewer life experiences to cope with different types of stress that appeared simultaneously. At the same time, last year students struggled the most with potential job prospects. This is somewhat expected because this group of students usually tries to find full-time jobs upon the degree completion. University management can mitigate these student concerns by introducing relevant practices based on the student study year.

Theoretical Implications

This study offers several contributions to better understand the mechanism of university support on student well-being during the COVID-19. First, our findings are in line with the prior studies on the relationships between stress and well-being, and support and well-being. The research on the impact of COVID-19 on student concerns for degree completion and job prospects is underdeveloped. Therefore, by examining student resource loss, we have extended the application scope of the CoR theory and enriched COVID-19 related research.

Second, our findings highlight that students may not perceive university support in the same way when it is related to their concerns for degree completion or job prospects. Prior studies have acknowledged the positive relationship between university support and student well-being ( Baik et al., 2019 ). Our findings imply that perceived effective support is context-specific. Under the impact of COVID-19, all students are concerned about their academic performance and are more exigent on university support. When students feel that they are not able to get support to achieve the balance between resource investment (e.g., spending more time to work online for group-based activities) and the challenge of continuing with their studies (e.g., receiving no immediate feedback when they have inquiries for lecturers or administrators), they may have a lower level of well-being ( Dodge et al., 2012 ). To mitigate the risk to their well-being, students feel the need to deploy more time and energy to protect themselves against resource loss and recovery ( Hobfoll et al., 2018 ).

Third, this study assessed negative in the moment well-being. Our results show that university support could mediate the relationship between impacts of COVID-19 (both on degree completion and job prospects) and student well-being. However, when students perceive a high level of support from the university, they feel a higher level of well-being and a lower level of negative in the moment well-being. This once again implies that university support plays an important mediating role in student perceptions of well-being.

Practical Implications

This study confirms the mediating role of university support that helps turning negative impact of COVID-19 into positive feelings of well-being. Universities could increase student well-being by giving support to student studies and their career and job prospects. This support should come from a wide range of university services that are responsible for all aspects of the student learning experience. For example, program faculty and directors should provide students sufficient and timely information about upcoming mandatory internships. Career centers should utilize their partnerships and networks in the local community to assist in finding their first job after graduation and/or internships. This support should include course instructors, program directors, university management and administration, digital and IT support, and supports from partnership universities for international exchange programs. Supervisors and administration should work closely with students conducting research projects related to their theses or dissertations. They should support them in setting the dissertation topic and research questions, data collection and data analysis, discussion of initiation findings, text drafting, and defending.

The study also suggests that a lack of questioning or concerns related to university support from students does not imply that students feel that they are receiving this support. This could indicate that students may feel forgotten, abandoned, or hopeless about receiving support from the university. Therefore, universities should ensure visibility and accessibility of support, which in the context of online learning would require integration and collaboration between academic and university support services (e.g., IT support, career centers, academic advising, and international exchange programs). They help students navigate the support systems and access all the resources they require to succeed academically and professionally. Universities should not only provide the resources needed for students to engage with online learning, but also propose training on different online pedagogies to course instructors, as these two points could ensure more a positive learning experience for students and their well-being outcome. In addition, universities should monitor the student well-being experience and provide relevant resources and interventions.

Also, with online learning, face-to-face social interactions are missing. Therefore, lecturers and administrative staff should concentrate more on relationship building. They should facilitate the online learning experience, adopt clear communication strategies, improve the learning tools (e.g., PowerPoint and recorded lectures) and diversify assessment methods (e.g., moving from traditional exams to video-based oral presentation and using applications to motivate students to engage in online discussions).

From the student perspective, universities should be aware of the students' changing emotional responses from positive to negative during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that the impact of COVID-19 would probably induce more negative emotional states, universities should offer more support for emotional management. This should encourage students to talk about their concerns, worries, and anxiety toward COVID-19 and to help them destigmatize the fear of COVID-19 on their studies and future. This support should not be a one-time-event, but ongoing. With positive emotions, students are more capable to counterbalance the perceived negative impact of COVID-19 on their degree completion and job prospects by effectively using different resources to reduce resource loss.

Finally, it is important to note that staff well-being is essential in order to support this student learning experience. Therefore, whilst universities propose different support activities to promote student learning, academic performance, and future job opportunities, they should also put in place a variety of resources to support staff. Pedagogy training, digital support, online well-ness programs, high quality information related to Covid-19, peer learning, appreciation attitude, and positive thinking should be promoted. University support and well-being feeling of their staff are a must for their adjustment to this “new normal” work context and a better service to students. It should be acknowledged that although many of the recommendations in this section are best practice in non-crisis times, this research has shown that the current acute pandemic situation and its effect on students (and staff) requires a sustained and reliable response, which utilizes existing policies and procedures to their maximum potential.

Limitations and Future Research

The study used a cross-sectional design, so the results cannot illustrate the process and evolution of how the identified variables influence student well-being. Considering the nature of the COVID-19 crisis, it would be very useful to develop a longitudinal study. Given the subjective nature of perceptions of well-being, there is an opportunity to extend the research and give a deeper understanding of the students' experience by taking a qualitative study approach. For example, phenomenology could help researchers understand lived experiences of students ( van Manen, 1990 ) during COVID-19. Phenomenology could also help to find out how students experience their well-being or how they “perceive it, describe it, feel about it, judge it, remember it, make sense of it and talk about it with others” ( Patton, 2002 , p. 104). Further studies could also explore potential variables that may be more likely to show differences in a cross-cultural context, for example, how various types of social support may be perceived differently in various cultural contexts. The study used self-reported data that could have created a certain bias, so future studies should consider using observations and document analysis to triangulate data.

The study found that there were no student concerns about the impact of COVID-19 on their future job prospects and this did not decrease their level of well-being. This result needs further research. For example, there may be some benefits of using a qualitative and cross-cultural approach such as diary methods. A longitudinal study could help tracking how student concerns for their future job prospects change. Many countries have overcome the second wave of COVID-19, but uncertainty about the economy and high unemployment rates remains. Similarly, it would be useful to understand how students address their concerns for their job prospects and employment and search for and obtain jobs.

The study showed the usefulness of the CoR theory in helping universities and students to understand the emotional responses and impacts on student well-being of the sudden and dramatic changes to the learning experience of an unexpected global crisis. It was found that a major crisis negatively impacts student well-being and their concerns about their studies. However, the longer-term concerns about job prospects and careers had no negative impact on well-being. Support was shown to be an important mediator in the overall impact on student well-being.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by University of Hertfordshire SSAHEC with Delegated Authority. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

GP and KM were substantially involved in planning and conducting the study. NV, SN, and SR-T carried out the data analysis. MP, CJ, and DY wrote the article with contributions by NV, GP, SN, and KM. All authors revised the manuscript critically for important intellectual content, read, and approved the submitted version. All authors were involved in distribution of the survey.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: COVID-19, university students, subjective well-being, university success, job prospects

Citation: Plakhotnik MS, Volkova NV, Jiang C, Yahiaoui D, Pheiffer G, McKay K, Newman S and Reißig-Thust S (2021) The Perceived Impact of COVID-19 on Student Well-Being and the Mediating Role of the University Support: Evidence From France, Germany, Russia, and the UK. Front. Psychol. 12:642689. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.642689

Received: 16 December 2020; Accepted: 09 June 2021; Published: 12 July 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Plakhotnik, Volkova, Jiang, Yahiaoui, Pheiffer, McKay, Newman and Reißig-Thust. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Natalia V. Volkova, nv.volkova@hse.ru

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

How is COVID-19 affecting student learning?

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, initial findings from fall 2020, megan kuhfeld , megan kuhfeld senior research scientist - nwea @megankuhfeld jim soland , jim soland assistant professor, school of education and human development - university of virginia, affiliated research fellow - nwea @jsoland beth tarasawa , bt beth tarasawa executive vice president of research - nwea @bethtarasawa angela johnson , aj angela johnson research scientist - nwea erik ruzek , and er erik ruzek research assistant professor, curry school of education - university of virginia karyn lewis karyn lewis director, center for school and student progress - nwea @karynlew.

December 3, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced uncertainty into major aspects of national and global society, including for schools. For example, there is uncertainty about how school closures last spring impacted student achievement, as well as how the rapid conversion of most instruction to an online platform this academic year will continue to affect achievement. Without data on how the virus impacts student learning, making informed decisions about whether and when to return to in-person instruction remains difficult. Even now, education leaders must grapple with seemingly impossible choices that balance health risks associated with in-person learning against the educational needs of children, which may be better served when kids are in their physical schools.

Amidst all this uncertainty, there is growing consensus that school closures in spring 2020 likely had negative effects on student learning. For example, in an earlier post for this blog , we presented our research forecasting the possible impact of school closures on achievement. Based on historical learning trends and prior research on how out-of-school-time affects learning, we estimated that students would potentially begin fall 2020 with roughly 70% of the learning gains in reading relative to a typical school year. In mathematics, students were predicted to show even smaller learning gains from the previous year, returning with less than 50% of typical gains. While these and other similar forecasts presented a grim portrait of the challenges facing students and educators this fall, they were nonetheless projections. The question remained: What would learning trends in actual data from the 2020-21 school year really look like?

With fall 2020 data now in hand , we can move beyond forecasting and begin to describe what did happen. While the closures last spring left most schools without assessment data from that time, thousands of schools began testing this fall, making it possible to compare learning gains in a typical, pre-COVID-19 year to those same gains during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from nearly 4.4 million students in grades 3-8 who took MAP ® Growth™ reading and math assessments in fall 2020, we examined two primary research questions:

• How did students perform in fall 2020 relative to a typical school year (specifically, fall 2019)?
• Have students made learning gains since schools physically closed in March 2020?

To answer these questions, we compared students’ academic achievement and growth during the COVID-19 pandemic to the achievement and growth patterns observed in 2019. We report student achievement as a percentile rank, which is a normative measure of a student’s achievement in a given grade/subject relative to the MAP Growth national norms (reflecting pre-COVID-19 achievement levels).

To make sure the students who took the tests before and after COVID-19 school closures were demographically similar, all analyses were limited to a sample of 8,000 schools that tested students in both fall 2019 and fall 2020. Compared to all public schools in the nation, schools in the sample had slightly larger total enrollment, a lower percentage of low-income students, and a higher percentage of white students. Since our sample includes both in-person and remote testers in fall 2020, we conducted an initial comparability study of remote and in-person testing in fall 2020. We found consistent psychometric characteristics and trends in test scores for remote and in-person tests for students in grades 3-8, but caution that remote testing conditions may be qualitatively different for K-2 students. For more details on the sample and methodology, please see the technical report accompanying this study.

In some cases, our results tell a more optimistic story than what we feared. In others, the results are as deeply concerning as we expected based on our projections.

Question 1: How did students perform in fall 2020 relative to a typical school year?

When comparing students’ median percentile rank for fall 2020 to those for fall 2019, there is good news to share: Students in grades 3-8 performed similarly in reading to same-grade students in fall 2019. While the reason for the stability of these achievement results cannot be easily pinned down, possible explanations are that students read more on their own, and parents are better equipped to support learning in reading compared to other subjects that require more formal instruction.

The news in math, however, is more worrying. The figure below shows the median percentile rank in math by grade level in fall 2019 and fall 2020. As the figure indicates, the math achievement of students in 2020 was about 5 to 10 percentile points lower compared to same-grade students the prior year.

Figure 1: MAP Growth Percentiles in Math by Grade Level in Fall 2019 and Fall 2020

Source: Author calculations with MAP Growth data. Notes: Each bar represents the median percentile rank in a given grade/term.

Question 2: Have students made learning gains since schools physically closed, and how do these gains compare to gains in a more typical year?

To answer this question, we examined learning gains/losses between winter 2020 (January through early March) and fall 2020 relative to those same gains in a pre-COVID-19 period (between winter 2019 and fall 2019). We did not examine spring-to-fall changes because so few students tested in spring 2020 (after the pandemic began). In almost all grades, the majority of students made some learning gains in both reading and math since the COVID-19 pandemic started, though gains were smaller in math in 2020 relative to the gains students in the same grades made in the winter 2019-fall 2019 period.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of change in reading scores by grade for the winter 2020 to fall 2020 period (light blue) as compared to same-grade students in the pre-pandemic span of winter 2019 to fall 2019 (dark blue). The 2019 and 2020 distributions largely overlapped, suggesting similar amounts of within-student change from one grade to the next.

Figure 2: Distribution of Within-student Change from Winter 2019-Fall 2019 vs Winter 2020-Fall 2020 in Reading

Source: Author calculations with MAP Growth data. Notes: The dashed line represents zero growth (e.g., winter and fall test scores were equivalent). A positive value indicates that a student scored higher in the fall than their prior winter score; a negative value indicates a student scored lower in the fall than their prior winter score.

Meanwhile, Figure 3 shows the distribution of change for students in different grade levels for the winter 2020 to fall 2020 period in math. In contrast to reading, these results show a downward shift: A smaller proportion of students demonstrated positive math growth in the 2020 period than in the 2019 period for all grades. For example, 79% of students switching from 3 rd to 4 th grade made academic gains between winter 2019 and fall 2019, relative to 57% of students in the same grade range in 2020.

Figure 3: Distribution of Within-student Change from Winter 2019-Fall 2019 vs. Winter 2020-Fall 2020 in Math

It was widely speculated that the COVID-19 pandemic would lead to very unequal opportunities for learning depending on whether students had access to technology and parental support during the school closures, which would result in greater heterogeneity in terms of learning gains/losses in 2020. Notably, however, we do not see evidence that within-student change is more spread out this year relative to the pre-pandemic 2019 distribution.

The long-term effects of COVID-19 are still unknown

In some ways, our findings show an optimistic picture: In reading, on average, the achievement percentiles of students in fall 2020 were similar to those of same-grade students in fall 2019, and in almost all grades, most students made some learning gains since the COVID-19 pandemic started. In math, however, the results tell a less rosy story: Student achievement was lower than the pre-COVID-19 performance by same-grade students in fall 2019, and students showed lower growth in math across grades 3 to 8 relative to peers in the previous, more typical year. Schools will need clear local data to understand if these national trends are reflective of their students. Additional resources and supports should be deployed in math specifically to get students back on track.

In this study, we limited our analyses to a consistent set of schools between fall 2019 and fall 2020. However, approximately one in four students who tested within these schools in fall 2019 are no longer in our sample in fall 2020. This is a sizeable increase from the 15% attrition from fall 2018 to fall 2019. One possible explanation is that some students lacked reliable technology. A second is that they disengaged from school due to economic, health, or other factors. More coordinated efforts are required to establish communication with students who are not attending school or disengaging from instruction to get them back on track, especially our most vulnerable students.

Finally, we are only scratching the surface in quantifying the short-term and long-term academic and non-academic impacts of COVID-19. While more students are back in schools now and educators have more experience with remote instruction than when the pandemic forced schools to close in spring 2020, the collective shock we are experiencing is ongoing. We will continue to examine students’ academic progress throughout the 2020-21 school year to understand how recovery and growth unfold amid an ongoing pandemic.

Thankfully, we know much more about the impact the pandemic has had on student learning than we did even a few months ago. However, that knowledge makes clear that there is work to be done to help many students get back on track in math, and that the long-term ramifications of COVID-19 for student learning—especially among underserved communities—remain unknown.

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Report | Coronavirus

COVID-19 and student performance, equity, and U.S. education policy : Lessons from pre-pandemic research to inform relief, recovery, and rebuilding

Report • By Emma García and Elaine Weiss • September 10, 2020

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Pandemic-relevant research offers key lessons as the education system responds to the coronavirus crisis:

• Research regarding online learning and teaching shows that they are effective only if students have consistent access to the internet and computers and if teachers have received targeted training and supports for online instruction. Because these needed requirements for effectiveness have been largely absent for many, remote education during the pandemic has impeded teaching and learning.
• Research on home schooling shows that it works well for students for whom intentional, personalized, and sufficient resources are available. The crisis-induced delivery of home schooling without time for planning around children’s learning styles and circumstances means that many children home schooled during the pandemic are not replicating such model and thus not reaping the associated benefits.
• Reduced learning time has likely impeded student learning and also affected the development of the whole child. Once the pandemic allows it, we will need to make up for this time by increasing both the amount and quality of learning time—through extended schedules, summer enrichment and after-school activities, more personalized instruction, and staffing strategies that reduce class sizes and staff schools with sufficient and highly credentialed educators.
• Research on chronic absenteeism and on remote learning reinforces the urgency of providing appropriate support to children who are least prepared and especially to those at risk of becoming disengaged and eventually dropping out.
• Research on summer learning (loss or gain) points to the importance of personalized instruction. The research shows that learning styles and outcomes vary greatly, and that the outcomes are a function of the educational resources that families and systems provide to children across the year and of a large number of factors and circumstances that shape children’s learning and development.
• Research shows that a lack of contingency planning exacerbates the negative impacts of recessions, natural disasters, and pandemics on learning. Contingency planning thus needs to be institutionalized and include emergency funding to replenish the resources drained during emergencies.

What we know about the pandemic’s consequences for education so far helps us plan next steps:

• Learning and development have been interrupted and disrupted for millions of students. The only effective response is to use diagnostic tests and other tools to meet each child where he or she is and to devise a plan for making up for the interruptions.
• The pandemic has exacerbated well-documented opportunity gaps that put low-income students at a disadvantage relative to their better-off peers. Opportunity gaps are gaps in access to the conditions and resources that enhance learning and development, and include access to food and nutrition, housing, health insurance and care, and financial relief measures.
• One of the most critical opportunity gaps is the uneven access to the devices and internet access critical to learning online. This digital divide has made it virtually impossible for some students to learn during the pandemic.
• The pandemic has exacerbated the limitations of standardized tests, which reward a narrow set of skills and more affluent students who have access to specialized instruction. Such tests could overwhelm or label children when what they need now are diagnostic assessments and needs-based assessments that assess where they are across a range of domains and what they need going forward.

Informed by our learning, here is a three-pronged plan for addressing the adverse impacts of COVID-19 on education and rebuilding stronger:

• Relief: Give schools urgent resources so that they can provide effective remote instruction and supports at scale during the pandemic.
• Recovery: Provide extra investments to help students and schools make up lost ground as they return to in-school operations.
• Rebuilding: Redesign the system to focus on nurturing the whole child, balancing cognitive with socioemotional skills development and ensuring that all children have access to the conditions and resources that enhance learning and development.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is overwhelming the functioning and outcomes of education systems—some of which were already stressed in many respects. This is true across the world and affects all children, though to differing degrees depending on multiple factors—including the country/region where they live, as well as their ages, family backgrounds, and degree of access to some “substitute” educational opportunities during the pandemic. In early spring as the pandemic was hitting its first peak, the virus consigned nearly all of over 55 million U.S. school children under the age of 18 to staying in their homes, with 1.4 billion out of school or child care across the globe (NCES 2019a; U.S. Census Bureau 2019; Cluver et al. 2020). Not only did these children lack daily access to school and the basic supports schools provide for many students, but they also lost out on group activities, team sports, and recreational options such as pools and playgrounds.

( COVID-19 & Education Webinar : Join us Wednesday for a discussion on this report, including opening remarks from Randi Weingarten, the president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, about the state of COVID-19 and education and what needs to be done now to support educators and mitigate the damage to student performance, especially the most vulnerable children. Register here. )

The shutdown of schools, compounded by the associated public health and economic crises, poses major challenges to our students and their teachers. Our public education system was not built, nor prepared, to cope with a situation like this—we lack the structures to sustain effective teaching and learning during the shutdown and to provide the safety net supports that many children receive in school. While we do not know the exact impacts, we do know that children’s academic performance is deteriorating during the pandemic, along with their progress on other developmental skills. We also know that, given the various ways in which the crisis has widened existing socioeconomic disparities and how these disparities affect learning and educational outcomes, educational inequities are growing (Rothstein 2004; Putnam 2015; Reardon 2011; García and Weiss 2017). As a consequence, many of the children who struggle the hardest to learn effectively and thrive in school under normal circumstances are now finding it difficult, even impossible in some cases, to receive effective instruction, and they are experiencing interruptions in their learning that will need to be made up for.

The 2020–2021 school year is now underway, and with many schools remaining physically closed as the 2020–2021 year begins, there is more we need to understand and think through if we are to meet the crisis head-on. If students are to not see their temporary interruptions become sustained and are to regain lost ground, if teachers are to do their jobs effectively during and after the pandemic, and if our education system is to deliver on its excellence and equity goals during the next phases of this pandemic, it will be critical to identify which students are struggling most and how much learning and development they have lost out on, which factors are impeding their learning, what problems are preventing teachers from teaching these children, and, very critically, which investments must be made to address these challenges. For each child, this diagnostic assessment will deliver a unique answer, and the system will have to meet the child where he or she is. A strengthened system based on meeting children where they are and providing them with what they need will be key to lifting up children.

This report briefly reviews the relevant literature on educational settings that have features in common with how education is occurring during the crisis and emerging evidence on opportunity gaps during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to propose a three-pronged plan. The plan covers the three Rs: (immediate) relief for schools, (short-term) recovery, and (long-term) rebuilding for schools and the education system as a whole.

Children are not in their schools: What should we expect the consequences to be?

The current downturn is unique, and in most ways it is much more severe than any we have experienced in recent history. Almost overnight, the pandemic forced the cancellation of the traditional learning that takes place in school settings. It imposed substantial alterations in the “inputs” used to produce education—typically all the individual, family, teacher, school, etc., characteristics or determinants that affect “outcomes” like test scores and graduation rates. The pandemic has affected inputs at home too, as families and communities juggling health and work crises are less able to provide supports for learning at home. 1 Because there are no direct comparisons to past events or trends, we are without fully valid references for assessing the likely impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on children. There are, however, specific aspects of this crisis that have arisen in other contexts and been studied by education researchers, and we can derive from them some guidance on topics such as the loss of learning time and use of alternative learning modes.

Here we thus summarize research findings on aspects of education that appear most pertinent to the current crisis. We selected this set of studied conditions because they represent situations in which children are out of school in large numbers or using the unusual learning tools that have become typical in recent months. As discussed in the sections below, however, the sudden, severe, and universal nature of this crisis means that the current contexts in which students are currently “absent,” engaged in “remote learning,” or “homeschooled” are very different during the pandemic. However, while these findings are only partially applicable to the situations arising during this pandemic, if we dig into why various modes of learning worked or did not work well, it can help guide how to improve learning as education continues under the pandemic—and how to lift children up once schools recover their normal mode of operation. 2

Decreased learning time has likely impeded student learning

The school lockdowns that started in the spring of 2020 reduced instructional and learning time, which are known to impede student performance, with disparate impacts on different groups of students.

Research on time in school anticipates the consequences of having learning interrupted

International and U.S. data provide a benchmark of what can be considered usual educational progress over a given school year. Here we look at data on reading, math, and science test results of 15-year-old students in countries all over the world from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2009) and data on a cohort of U.S. children who entered kindergarten in 2010 for the 2010–2011 school year from Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011 (ECLS-K-2010–2011), run by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES 2010–2011). From these studies, it has been estimated how much children learn over a school year (to make the estimates of how far the group’s average score on skills were at the end of the year from their skill levels at the beginning of a year comparable across studies, we use standard deviations). On average, students advance in their academic performance by between about 0.3 standard deviations (SD) and 0.5 SD to 0.7 SD per year, depending on their age and subject/skill (OECD 2009; own analysis based on NCES 2010–2011). 3 The 2019–2020 school year was cut by at least one third relative to its normal length, which, assuming linear increments in growth over the year and no major other obstacles, suggests a loss of at least 0.1 SD across the board, and larger in earlier grades. These benchmarks will be helpful as we look at the various ways that students have seen their learning interrupted and disrupted this year, and they will continue to do so in 2020–2021.

It is useful as well to examine the research on the length of the school day, which has identified a causal relationship between the amount of (high-quality) instructional time and student performance (Figlio, Holden, and Özek 2018; Goodman 2014; Kidronl and Lindsay 2014; Jin Jez and Wassmer 2013; Marcotte and Hansen 2010). Challenges, though, arise in most evaluations because it is difficult to disentangle the effects of the length of the school day from the effects of starting the school day earlier, or switching to a four-day school week, or to year-round instruction. 4

Figlio, Holden, and Özek (2018) find that extending the school day by an hour to provide literacy instruction increases reading scores by 0.05 SD in elementary schools. Thompson (2019) explains that school days lost due to weather-related cancellations negatively impact performance (citing Marcotte 2007; Marcotte and Hemelt 2008), and that the positive impact of a four-day school week on performance is due to the longer school day, the increased flexibility, and the expanded total learning time over the year. He finds a negative effect (0.03–0.05 SD) of four-day school weeks on performance in Oregon, where weekly instructional time was lower in the districts adopting this model.

Research on summer learning losses and gains show that these vary widely

Another body of research that speaks to potential lost learning time arises from studies of so-called summer learning loss. In earlier research, researchers consistently found that test scores for low-income students would decrease over the summer, while test scores for better-off students would stay constant or increase slightly (Kuhfeld 2019 based on Cooper et al. 1996). 5 (This pattern has also been referred to in some studies as “slide” or “setback”). A limitation of this earlier research, however, was that the samples represented students who were in school in the 1970s and 1980s—and thus were exposed to very different circumstances than their current counterparts. 6

The findings from more recent evidence on summer learning are less consistent. One study reveals a substantial learning loss over the summer of about one to two months in reading and from one to three months of school-year learning in math (Kufheld 2019). Others find that, on average, the change in scores over the summer is near zero—which von Hippel, Workman, and Downey (2018) have renamed “summer slowdown” or “summer stagnation.” Researchers tend to agree, though, on the fact that there is a large variation in summer learning among students, and on the fact that gaps between students of differing socioeconomic status (SES)—specifically high- and low-SES students—widen (Atteberry and McEachin 2020; Kuhfeld 2019; von Hippel, Workman, and Downey 2018). 7

Multiple factors are used to explain the variation in these findings. In addition to differences in the educational resources that families provide children across the year, there are a large number of factors that appear to affect learning and are of particular relevance in the current context when trying to gauge the level of learning that has taken place during the pandemic: these findings on summer learning (loss or gain) reflect the great range of learning styles that students exhibit during the summer, or when schools are not in session, i.e., learning styles and outcome levels vary greatly because students have different innate individual characteristics and their learning and development is shaped by multiple factors and circumstances, in and out of school. This fact will be critically important when schools are back in session in the following two ways. First, when educators measure and assess children’s learning, they will need to consider that there are many ways that children learn and many types of knowledge that they acquire beyond math and reading. In other words, teaching and assessing children needs to be done within a framework that understands that each child may have learned differently and may have learned different things. Second, when designing how to best lift children up to make up for the extended out-of-school sessions and disruptions, it will be critical to create more personalized instruction and extend learning (see the policy section at the end of the report).

Research on chronic absenteeism reinforces the urgency of tending children at risk of becoming disengaged

The literature on student absenteeism also sheds light on the relationship between learning and instructional time. The evidence indicates that the negative relationship between absenteeism and student outcomes becomes more intense the more school days that a student misses. Using data from public schools in Chicago, Allensworth and Evans (2016) noted that each week of absence per semester in ninth grade is associated with a more than 20% decline in the probability of graduating from high school. With respect to performance, the disadvantage associated with absenteeism grows as the number of days missed increases: students who missed 1–2 school days, 3–4 days, 5–10 days, or more than 10 days scored, respectively, 0.10, 0.29, 0.39, and 0.64 SD below students who missed no school on mathematics performance for eighth graders (García and Weiss 2018; see Figure A reproduced below).

As this correlation between days absent and declining test scores indicates, there also seems to be a point after which the disadvantage becomes much larger. Indeed, researchers put a strong emphasis on “chronic absenteeism” as the critical indicator, as students who are chronically absent are at serious risk of falling behind in school, having lower grades and test scores, exhibiting behavioral issues, and, ultimately, dropping out (Balfanz 2017; U.S. Department of Education 2016; Gottfried and Ehrlich 2018). 8 Indeed, the risk of dropping out is of particular concern for students for whom the pandemic may act as the revolving door but one that ushers them away from the school period (IES 2020; Dorn et al. 2020; Stancati, Brody, and Fontdeglòria 2020; Torres 2020). The United Nations has recently defined this as a “generational catastrophe” (United Nations 2020).

A final point to highlight from this body of research is the range of reasons for, and thus strategies needed to reduce, student absenteeism. There are multiple reasons why students miss classes, as well as large differences in the absenteeism rate among both individual students and student subgroups. Those seeking to develop effective policies to reduce absenteeism, especially chronic absenteeism, understand the need to examine the root causes—academic disengagement, socioemotional distress, economic challenges, health problems, and others. Initiatives that have been rigorously evaluated show that it is critical both to identify the specific reason(s) why a student is missing school and to respond with targeted, relevant supports. 9 This point is particularly relevant in the current context, in which so many students are frequently absent for a variety of reasons that may be difficult for teachers and schools to know or address.

The more frequently students miss school, the worse their performance : Performance disadvantage experienced by eighth graders who missed school relative to students with perfect attendance in the last month, by number of days missed (standard deviations)

The data below can be saved or copied directly into Excel.

The data underlying the figure.

Notes: Data reflect performance in the 2015 NAEP mathematics assessment. Estimates are obtained after controlling for race/ethnicity, poverty status, gender, IEP status, and ELL status; for the racial/ethnic composition of the student’s school; and for the share of students in the school who are eligible for FRPL (a proxy for school socioeconomic composition). All estimates are statistically significant at p < 0.01.

Source:  EPI analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress microdata, 2015. Chart adapted from Figure A in García and Weiss 2018.

Copy the code below to embed this chart on your website.

Of course, the various approaches examined by the research on learning time assume two groups of students: those who are missing some learning time in school and those who are not. (In general, they compare “treatment” versus “nontreatment” groups to estimate impacts.) This comparison does not hold during the lockdown. Instead, all students are missing out on in-class instruction, and instead have been attending school remotely via various online arrangements that in some ways resemble homeschooling or online education. As discussed below, the evidence about homeschooling and remote education presents serious limitations, given their very different context, but nonetheless uncovers many issues that we will need to address in post-pandemic education.

Lacking the needed requirements for effectiveness, remote and alternative learning and online instruction during the pandemic has likely affected teaching and learning

The two main tools for education available to children during the lockdowns have been remote and alternative learning and, at least technically, a homeschooling environment. Evidence on these two modes make clear the conditions that would be needed in order for children to effectively learn under these conditions and for teachers to effectively teach under these conditions. As the following subsections show, most of these conditions have been lacking in recent months.

Research on effective online learning indicates it is critical that students have the tools and the experience

Online learning means, first and fundamentally, the shift from face-to-face learning to the use of devices of various sorts to deliver that learning. Successful online learning thus requires that students (and teachers) be familiar and proficient in their uses of those devices for learning. Of course, even more fundamentally, it requires that the devices exist. Here we discuss the needs of students.

We have limited knowledge about how much and for which purposes students have used devices and technology at home up to this point. An estimated 1.5 million K–12 students participated in some online learning in 2010 (Bettinger and Loeb 2017, based on Wicks 2010). 10 Figure B uses PISA data from 2018 for the United States to show that, while students spent extensive time online prior to the pandemic, that time was heavily spent on social activities, browsing or seeking information, playing games, or accessing email. Students spent less time on educational activities, such as school work or communicating with other students or teachers. These findings suggest that over the past few months as children transitioned suddenly to online learning, they did so without necessarily having the practice or experience to learn well online, and that the transition required them to shift their device-use habits from leisure to studying. What we also know is that remote learning demands that children ignore the distractions that are now in front of their faces all the time and to which they, like all of us, are naturally drawn. 11

What activities do 15-year-olds use digital devices for out of school and how often do they use them? : Frequency with which 15-year-olds use digital devices out of school for different activities, 2018

Note: Shares are based on the average use of digital devices out of school for selected activities under each type of activity.

Note: Shares are based on the average use of digital devices out of school for selected activities under each type of activity. “Social networks” includes the use of digital devices out of school for chatting online and for social networks (for example, Facebook); “Surfing” includes browsing the internet for fun videos (e.g., YouTube) and for downloading music, films, games or software from the Internet; “Emailing” includes using email; “Seeking information” includes reading news on the internet and obtaining practical information from the internet; “Games” includes playing one-player games and playing collaborative online games; “School work” references browsing the internet for school work (e.g., for preparing an essay or presentation, following up on lessons, downloading or uploading or browsing material from a school's website, and doing homework on a computer; and “Group communication” includes the use of digital devices out of school for  communication with other students about school work or for communication with teachers and submission of assignments.

Source : EPI analysis using Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data for the U.S. (OECD 2018).

In addition to assessing quality and time, the literature on the use of devices assumes that all students have access to appropriate digital devices—i.e., it assumes no digital divide. As has been extensively documented, however, that is not the case. For example, García, Weiss, and Engdahl (2020) show that nearly 16% of eighth graders, or one in six who participated in the National Center for Education Statistics’ National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for 2017, do not have a desktop or laptop computer at home on which to follow their classes. And a small fraction of eighth graders, 4.2%, lack home internet, the other essential instrument for remote study. (It’s important to note that the survey questions do not ask about the quality or coverage of the internet access, or the number of computers in the house, and that the information predates the pandemic’s arrival. Devices once available for homework may now be shared with siblings or be used by parents for work. 12 )

A final caveat is that there is still limited evidence on the effectiveness of online education. A critical aspect highlighted by Bettinger and Loeb (2017) is that online courses are difficult, especially for the students who are least prepared. 13 Research on performance of children attending virtual charter schools confirms the importance of self-engagement and parental supervision for success with this mode of education. Also, selection into these schools (students disengaged with  traditional schools enter these schools); worse inputs (teacher-to-student ratios, one-on-one instruction, etc.) than in traditional schools; and other features of these schools translated into negative effects on performance. 14 Later in the report we discuss the requirements for successful online education from the perspective of teachers.

Research on home schooling makes clear that it works well for students under narrow circumstances

According to the NCES, close to 1.7 million students, or about 3.3% of K–12 students, were home-schooled in 2016 (NCES 2018). 15 Parents who home-schooled their children cited the following as the most important reasons for doing so: concerns about the school environment, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure; dissatisfaction with academic instruction at available schools; and a desire to provide religious instruction (Grady 2017).

In terms of its effectiveness, performance of home-schooled students is generally higher than that of their non-home-schooled peers. A review of 14 studies found consistent positive results in 11, mixed results in another study (some positive and some negative results), zero impact in another study, and neutral and negative effects in a final one. The estimate of the effects (based on eight of the 14 studies for which this information was available) ranged from very small (0.05 SD) to extremely large (1.13 SD) (Ray 2017a). Using percentile metrics, home-schooled students scored, on average, at or above the 84th percentile in all subject areas (Ray 2017b). 16

While these findings may look promising, however, it is important to keep in mind two key considerations when interpreting these results. First, many more resources are devoted to home-schooled children, so they would be expected to perform higher, all else equal. Also, higher performance among home-schooled students may be due more to their selection into the category than the “treatment”/type of education they receive. 17

Belfield (2004), for example, suggests that the improved outcomes among students who are home-schooled could be due to flexible instruction (without age-tracking), small “class sizes,” and dedicated parent-teachers who should make home schooling more effective than other forms of education. He also notes that “educational outcomes may be skewed toward those on which the family has competence, and educational progress may be slow if there is no formative assessment or peer-pressure to learn (although home-school parents may exert more pressure or have higher expectations as a result of their supervision).” More recent studies suggest that parameters such as structured or unstructured instruction may also be important drivers of the results (Neuman and Guterman 2016).

These underlying factors could be particularly relevant in the current crisis. Many of the same stark distinctions between effective and ineffective online education and home schooling would apply to the “ emergency remote learning” done at home under a pandemic: students who entered the pandemic better off and those whose parents have been trained in instruction or have a particular ability teach would likely perform better than students whose parents have not been able to develop (or as successful at developing) those skills. In general, parents who were suddenly thrust into the role of home-schoolers had no such preparation; most are taking on that new task while juggling the full range of other home-care responsibilities as well as, in many cases, full-time remote jobs. That said, students whose parents have more formal education likely also have an advantage in this context—as they do in nonpandemic contexts—further compounding the disparities that low-income students are accruing (see, for example, Dinarski 2020; Rothstein 2020; Belfield 2004; Goldstein 2020a). 18

Evidence on online instruction emphasizes that teachers also need training and supports

As the discussion of successful versus unsuccessful remote and online learning reveals, there are multiple requirements needed for online education to work as intended and deliver positive results. Just as the requirements for effective student learning have largely not been met during the pandemic, the same is true for effective online instruction.

First, there was little time to design and develop instructional tools for wide deployment. 19 As a recent analysis of research on the subject details,

Online education, including online teaching and learning, has been studied for decades. Numerous research studies, theories, models, standards, and evaluation criteria focus on quality online learning, online teaching, and online course design. What we know from research is that effective online learning results from careful instructional design and planning, using a systematic model for design and development. The design process and the careful consideration of different design decisions have an impact on the quality of the instruction. And it is this careful design process that will be absent in most cases in these emergency shifts. 20 (Hodges et al. 2020)

Moreover, it is hard to plan and to design effective instruction for the COVID-19 era when teachers and school districts don’t have a framework (or even the right language) to accommodate what they are doing. As Hodges et al. (2020) emphasized when exploring how colleges and universities were coping with the sudden and rapid shift to remote learning (in March 2020), understanding the current circumstances required distinguishing between online or remote learning generally. For our current context, they suggested the term “emergency remote teaching,” which helps signal the uncertainties and unknowns that could affect teachers’ instruction.

Second, weak systems of support, including lack of professional development on how to integrate computers into instruction, have left teachers less than optimally equipped to teach during the pandemic. 21

Slightly over two in three public school teachers report having participated in professional development activities on the use of computers for instruction in the past 12 months, as shown in Figure C , based on García and Weiss 2019 using data from the 2011–2012 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). 22 But those who participated in these activities were not broadly satisfied with them. Among these teachers, one in four found the activity very useful, with about one in three finding it either not useful or just somewhat useful. And teachers who participate in such activities have to surmount barriers to do so, as access to work time and supports to participate in professional development are very limited. Among all teachers, only half have released time from teaching to participate in professional development (50.9 percent), and less than a third are reimbursed for conferences or workshop fees (28.2 percent). 23

Few teachers are well-trained in using computers for instruction

Shares of teachers who said they had training in the past 12 months on the use of computers for instruction, shares of teachers reporting usefulness of training they received in using computers for instruction.

Notes: Data are for teachers in public noncharter schools. The bottom figure shows shares of teachers who answered “very useful,” “useful,” “somewhat useful,” or “not useful” when asked, for the specific professional development activity, “Overall, how useful were these activities to you?”

Source : 2011–2012 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) microdata from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Adapted from García and Weiss 2019.

The limited training pre-pandemic is compounded by the limited technical support during the pandemic. Most K–12 teachers did not contemplate online instruction until being forced to do so by the pandemic. As a result, teachers have had to come up with a variety of options on the fly, from assigning daily or weekly coursework that students turn in online to full classes conducted via Zoom and a range of approaches in between. We can expect that some of these online strategies launched during the COVID-19 crisis did not lead to optimal outcomes.

Third, inadequate systems for tracking attendance online leave teachers in the dark on a key “input” of education: student learning time. Even the most well-trained teacher when it comes to online instruction won’t be effective if his or her students are not online and following instruction. At the most basic level, schools are trying to assess how broadly and consistently students are interacting with teachers and receiving instruction. One ambitious effort has been in Southern Florida, where districts rigorously track attendance and contact parents when students are absent. Quickly recognizing that relying on student log-ins failed to capture much of the activity taking place, districts in Palm Beach County and the Florida Keys ask teachers to log student participation in online forums and completion of assigned work. In general, schools in this system are seeing attendance that is only modestly lower than normal, with the biggest drop-offs among the youngest and oldest students (who, respectively, need parents’ help to get online and are least motivated to take part). However, while the system helps monitor potential race- and class-based disparities in attendance, concerns remain (Bakeman 2020). Attesting the importance of attendance, some school districts that have chosen online instruction for the beginning of the 2020–2021 school year are making registering attendance compulsory through their platforms. 24

Fourth, the emotional bonds critical to any kind of learning are just as important for remote learning or home schooling but hard to attain in the current crisis. Even more so than college professors, K–12 teachers also need to retain emotional bonds with their students, especially younger ones, that can be extremely difficult to attain remotely. Many of these teachers are also parents and so must juggle their children’s activities, such as helping their children with homework, with their own job responsibilities. And teachers working with particularly vulnerable students face additional challenges as some of these students lack access to computers to work or even enough internet bandwidth (see barriers to access described below).

The “whole-child” development that occurs at school was also interrupted during the pandemic

For children, going to school is not just about learning reading and math: it’s also about developing the social and emotional skills critical to succeeding in life. School closures eliminated some of these critically important aspects of school beyond academic activity, such as the development that occurs through personal relationships among students and between students and teachers, after-school activities that support children’s mental and emotional well-being and skills development, and a sense of routine. In addition to the cessation of their normal activities at school, during the pandemic, children have lost in-person contact with relatives and friends and have witnessed many sobering daily life realities, from parents who may be unsure where the next meal or rent payment will come from or who are working risky jobs in order to make ends meet, to family members fearing that loved ones are in danger of serious illness or even death. Overall, the crisis has helped highlight the importance of other skills that are often overlooked in the school context, but that should be nurtured as part of going to school and that will merit more attention in the aftermath of the pandemic.

A range of skills often referred to as socioemotional or noncognitive skills—including creativity, tolerance, persistence, empathy, resilience, self-control, and time management—have long been neglected in education policy, which has tended to follow the so-called cognitive hypothesis (Tough 2012; Ravitch 2011, 2020; Rothstein, Jacobsen, and Wilder 2008). 25 These noncognitive skills are deemed lower priorities in academic contexts—including skills that children typically lagging behind could have an edge in—and their integration in the usual components of learning and teaching is far from standard. As a result, when decisions about curriculum, standards, and evaluation are made, socioemotional skills tend to be the last on the priority list and the first on the chopping block, while testing highly on math and reading—skills that tend to be correlated with having more educated parents and higher household incomes—is richly rewarded in school, furthering “deficit” narratives (faulty messages about who can and cannot succeed in school, and about what succeeding in school means).

For sure, parents and teachers have long been attuned to the broad range of life skills that their students need to develop, but this crisis has sharpened that focus. The sudden need for children across the board to adapt to uncertain and rapidly changing circumstances and to cope with new levels of trauma make it all the more urgent to address this disparity between what parents and teachers understand about the breadth of skills critical to child development and systems that focus on testing a narrow set of cognitive skills. For example, resilience—the ability to adapt to and thrive in different situations—along with persistence and self-control have gained new recognition as important life skills during these months of the pandemic. Children transitioned to online learning overnight and have had to follow classes without the direct supervision of the teacher or the interactions with other students, which requires a higher than usual degree of self-control and persistence. Creativity is another skill that likely is serving children well during this crisis: Students who find new ways to keep themselves engaged and to make forced isolation productive are benefiting, while their peers who are easily bored are losing ground.

As we slowly move forward during the pandemic and we return to “normal,” it is going to be more important than ever that we do not let this recognition of whole-child development fall away and revert to a narrow focus on academics. Doing so would cause harm on several fronts. First, it would ignore and potentially exacerbate the trauma that many children are experiencing. Second, it would put low-income students even further behind—both by weighing heavily the areas of learning that they have been least able to access and by failing to recognize the natural variation in students’ strengths across a broader range of skills, or “patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior” (Borghans et al. 2008). And finally it would miss a unique opportunity to better balance what schools can do. Noncognitive skills are demonstrably as important as other cognitive skills when it comes to ensuring that children will thrive both in school and later in life. Moreover, since academic and socioemotional skills develop in tandem, and in recognition of the added challenges during the pandemic, it will be more critical to approach skills development holistically and make teaching and nurturing the whole child central, rather than marginal (see García 2014 and García and Weiss 2016 for a summary of this literature).

Recessions, natural disasters, and pandemics disrupt learning the most when there is no contingency planning

As noted above, prior research on circumstances somewhat similar to the shutdown during the pandemic is important to review—findings from this research may not be directly applicable due to substantial differences in the circumstances, but understanding the mechanisms through which learning occurs under these circumstances, as well as how to be prepared for the upheaval, is critical to informing our way out of this current crisis and our readiness for future ones. This is particularly the case regarding evidence from the research on “education in emergencies,” which examines the provision of education in emergency and post-emergency situations due to pandemics, other natural disasters, and conflicts and wars, generally in poor countries around the world. 26 The practical recommendations from this field have been largely ignored in the education policy arena until now, because they have not seemed to apply in the rich countries. 27 However, there are some exceptions overall and for the United States in particular, including cases of natural disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Maria.

The following lessons can be extracted from this research: Emergencies lead to undeniably negative impacts on educational processes and outcomes; the most disadvantaged population subgroups experience the largest, and most lasting, negative consequences; and contingency plans—absent during the ongoing pandemic—are of critical importance. Providing education, often made available because of these plans, leads to positive outcomes to children and societies. Moreover, emergencies tend to strain existing resources, adding additional challenges.

We summarize here a few key findings. For example, by the end of the school year following the devastation that Hurricanes Katrina (August 2005) and Rita (September 2005) brought to New Orleans, the performance of students who were displaced dropped by 0.07 to 0.22 standard deviations relative to what their performance would have been without the hurricanes (this range includes an average across subjects and grades calculated by Pane et al. [2008] and estimates by Sacerdote [2012] on math and reading). Principals reported that students who were displaced were judged more likely than students in the control groups to engage in negative behaviors, such as fighting, violating school rules, arguing, bullying, playing in isolation, and eating in isolation, and more likely to need mental health counseling; they were also judged less likely to engage in positive behaviors, such as participating in before- or after-school clubs or activities, school-sponsored social events outside the school day, or sports teams (Pane et al. 2008). Sacerdote (2012) also found longer-run effects, including rates of college attendance that were one to four percentage points lower relative to trends measured in cohorts not affected by the natural disasters. 28 Importantly, Özek (2020) finds that some of the negative effects of disasters on students mostly vanish after the first year when there is an “adequate compensatory allocation of resources.” Among the resources he cites as critical to compensating the negative effects of emergencies on learning are teachers—specifically ensuring that the most effective teachers are working with the most vulnerable students. Although, as noted, Özek (2020) found that first-year effects tend to decline, effects persist in the second year in high-poverty schools and in low-performing schools.

Natural disasters and recessions also create economic shocks. Research exploring the consequences of recessions such as the Great Recession sheds light on ways today’s economic crisis is likely affecting children’s education. For example, Irons (2009) discusses the ways that “unemployment and income losses can reduce educational achievement by threatening early childhood nutrition; reducing families’ abilities to provide a supportive learning environment (including adequate health care, summer activities, and stable housing); and by forcing a delay or abandonment of college plans.” Shafiq (2010) also discusses potential negative effects from economic shocks, such as long hours worked by parents, which “reduces the time that parents can devote to assisting their child with homework, reading, and other educational activities.”

Economic shocks in turn lead to cuts in education budgets. Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong (2018) show that spending cuts enacted during the last recession had detrimental effects on education outcomes: the per-pupil spending cuts that states made during the Great Recession (by roughly 7% overall, by over 10% in seven states, and by more than 20% in two states) reduced college enrollment and test scores, particularly for children in poor neighborhoods, and the impacts of these cuts were greater for Black and white students than for Latino students. Jackson, Wigger, and Xiong (2018) estimated that the impacts of such large-scale and persistent education budget cuts are very significant: a $1,000 reduction in per-pupil spending led to a reduction in test scores of about 0.045 standard deviations and a roughly 3 percentage point decline in the share of high school students who go to college. Often, recovery after a shock never fully happens, as explored in more detail later in our report.

The education-in-emergencies research underscores that “contingency plans” are critical to dealing with emergency and post-emergency situations. Specifically during crises arising from war, conflicts, natural disasters, and pandemics, children are displaced often as homes, neighborhoods, and schools are destroyed—and this may threaten survival or inflict some level of trauma upon children. 29 A certain level of preparedness is critical in order to provide an effective response at the onset of a crisis, and to “prepare, cope, and recover” (UN IASC 2007, 2015; Anderson 2020; Azzi-Hucktigran and Shmis 2020).

Although it is expected that countries and their education agencies have a plan to deal with short-run disruptions (i.e., snow days, flu season, etc.), such expectations are uncommon when it comes to contingency plans for larger, longer emergencies. Most information including guidance on planning for education in emergencies comes from several international organizations involved in major, longer-term emergencies. One exception is a reference in a White House publication reviewing assistance provided after Katrina; these words should be heeded in the aftermath of this pandemic:

Individual local and state plans, as well as relatively new plans created by the federal government since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, failed to adequately account for widespread or simultaneous catastrophes.…The President made clear that we must do better in the future. The objective of this report is to identify and establish a roadmap on how to do that, and lay the groundwork for transforming how this Nation—from every level of government to the private sector to individual citizens and communities—pursues a real and lasting vision of preparedness. To get there will require significant change to the status quo, to include adjustments to policy, structure, and mindset. (The White House 2006)

As has been evident in the past few months, there was no national education plan in place to deal with medium-run or long-run emergencies for the scale of COVID-19. Existing plans (as indicated, outlined by international organizations) offer “contingency planning tools” to ensure appropriate arrangements are made to analyze the impact of potential crises and to respond in a timely and effective way. The strategies suggested are characterized as flexible learning approaches, which reflect the reality that the circumstances and needs vary widely. Continued provision of education is expected to support both learning and the psychosocial well-being of both students and educators (Anderson 2020). Some strategies aim at promoting cognitive, emotional, and social development through structured, meaningful, and creative activities in a school setting or in informal learning spaces that replace the unavailable traditional schools. In other words, these programs are designed to provide support similar to that provided by good school systems on a regular basis. 30

Clearly, there are potentially relevant aspects of research on emergency education that, where emergency education resembles the COVID-19 situation, could help policymakers identify what needs to be done immediately and going forward to help schools and students recover. Before we discuss these, we devote much of the next section to assessing how this crisis is expected to have worsened impacts on vulnerable subgroups, and to exacerbate inequities overall.

How is COVID-19 exacerbating opportunity gaps (and what steps are schools taking in response)?

The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated the well-documented opportunity and enrichment gaps that put low-income students at a disadvantage relative to their better-off peers. By opportunity and enrichment gaps, we mean gaps in access to the conditions or resources that enhance learning and development between low-income students and their higher-income peers (with low-income students less likely than their better-off peers to access these conditions and resources). Before we delve into the details, it is important to state that this should not come as a surprise. The baseline operating status of the education system in the United States before the pandemic had severe problems with regard to equity. Put simply, as a nation, we have structured the education system to deliver the disparate outcomes that it delivers, i.e., outcomes that differ by social class, minority status, and other student characteristics: “It’s not a coincidence or accident” (ASI 2020). 31 Here we briefly describe a few of the gaps that are most directly relevant to students’ abilities to learn during the pandemic: basic needs, economic relief, and support for families and health. We also discuss how the pandemic has exacerbated the limitations of standardized assessments, especially when used to measure performance gaps in education.

There are two important caveats to this discussion. First, any recent statistics are preliminary (and likely quite conservative). Second, there are, of course, other gaps that we are not able include here—for example, in wealth through homeownership or toxic stress linked to structural racism (Lerner 2020; Morsy and Rothstein 2019)—but that are interacting with and compounding those factors that we are able to examine. As leading education and civil rights organizations summarizing the breadth of the opportunities and enrichment gaps note, “the transition to educating students in their homes or shelters has exposed and exacerbated inequities in education, food security, and housing that have long existed” (AFT, LDF, and Leadership Conference 2020). We add health and mental health to that list, and we emphasize the critical role schools play as part of the social safety net and as the first responders to children’s basic needs (Kirk 2019; Weiss and Reville 2019; ASI 2020).

The pandemic has exacerbated opportunity gaps associated with uneven access to food and nutrition, shelter, health insurance, and financial relief measures

The disruption caused by the pandemic and the interruption of the normal operation of schools continue to pose barriers to meeting the most basic of children’s needs (access to food and nutrition and shelter). Families’ resources also have been largely impacted by the economic downturn that followed the disruption. There is overwhelming evidence that low-income children and their families have much less access to nutrition and shelter, that children of color and children from immigrant families are disproportionately affected, and that this lack of access has palpable consequences for their development. It is no secret that the inequities are built into our economic and policy setups, and that these inequities affect children’s development as well. The school shutdowns and economic crisis caused by the pandemic are exposing and exacerbating these challenges.

Evidence on expanded opportunity gaps due to lack of access to food and nutrition

In 2013, as the United States was still recovering from the recession of 2007–2008, half of all public-school students were eligible for free or reduced-price school meals (SEF 2015; Carnoy and García 2017). In other words, years into the economic recovery, a record share of one in two public-school students lived in a household that was unable, absent government support, to consistently feed them. With millions of adults newly out of work due to the economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic—and federal relief insufficient, slow, and difficult to access—many more children are now in food-insecure homes (i.e., they have limited or uncertain access to adequate food, as measured by responses to survey questions about access to food).

Using data from the new Household Pulse Survey (HHPS) from the U.S. Census Bureau, 29.8% of respondents with children were food insecure (Schanzenbach and Tomeh 2020). Bauer (2020) estimates that there were almost 14 million children living in a household characterized by child food insecurity during the week of June 19–23, 2020, “5.6 times as many as in all of 2018 (2.5 million) and 2.7 times as many as during peak of the Great Recession in 2008 (5.1 million).” 32

The data about food insecurity is backed up by news reports showing record levels of visits to food banks during the early part of the pandemic and the shortage of resources to meet the demand for food. According to Feeding America, one in seven Americans relied on food pantries before the pandemic, with demand doubling or tripling in many places in the first weeks of the crisis. By late April, less than two months into the pandemic, food pantries in Chicago and Houston were almost out of staples, and one third of New York City’s food banks had closed due to lack of supplies, donations, and/or volunteers (Conlin, Baertlein, and Walljasper 2020).

Schools continuously tried to fill the void to the extent they could, with buildings that were closed for instruction reopening as places to collect, prepare, and distribute meals. Some schools were serving breakfast or dinner or are giving out weekend meal “packs” for students, and many provide meals for older and younger siblings as well. For example, schools in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, served an average of 8,000 meals—three per day—for the first 39 days of the pandemic, hitting the one million mark on May 12. District Superintendent George Arlotto said of the importance of supporting his students, “We know if we’re not serving meals they might not be getting fed, at least certainly not three meals a day” (Streicher 2020).

However, difficulty matching meals to parents’ schedules and lack of sufficient transportation to deliver meals limited many districts’ ability to serve the students they normally serve. Across the Denver metro region, district capacity during the first month of school closure starting in March spanned a wide range, serving just 12% of students in the largest and lowest-income district, Denver; 16% in Jeffco; 34% in Aurora; and 57% in the Adams 12 Five Star Schools district (Meltzer, Robles, and LaMarr LeMee 2020).

Across the country overall, the networks set up to provide meals left out a large proportion of children. “Only 61.0% of parents whose families received free or reduced-price meals during the school year reported receiving school meal assistance during closures,” noted Waxman, Gupta, and Karpman (2020), who also found that 17.2% of parents living with children under age 19 reported receiving charitable food in May 2020.

Evidence on expanded opportunity gaps due to lack of access to shelter

In addition to children who are especially vulnerable during the pandemic because they rely on schools for basic food and nutrition are children who are homeless. Data show that before the pandemic began, large numbers of students in districts across the country were homeless. 33 For this numerous group of students, getting an education remotely is unthinkable. With millions of adults newly out of work due the economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic—and eviction bans expired or expiring in localities around the country—unstable housing is putting the challenges of educating homeless students into starker relief. Some school districts are paying attention to the needs of their homeless students. In San Jose, California, for example, some schools are expected to be open for counseling and in-person instruction for homeless and special needs students (Lambert, Burke, and Tadayon 2020). The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH 2020) has issued some general guidelines as to how school districts can work with local public health officials and community partners to identify temporary, safe, and stable shelter options for families or youth experiencing homelessness who must quarantine. The agency also provides guidance on ensuring homeless children’s access to remote education while schools are closed.

Evidence on expanded opportunity gaps due to unstable employment and lack of access to financial relief and health insurance

Loss of work has hit families across the board, as initial unemployment shocks in the travel and entertainment industries expanded to shut down restaurants, retail, and even some of the health care sector shortly after the pandemic started. While some of those jobs have returned, we still have extremely elevated rates of unemployment and loss of health insurance. And low-income parents are in particularly tough situations because of the low-paying and unstable nature of their jobs. Those who lost already-precarious non-standard jobs (like “gig” work and other independent contracting work) don’t qualify for unemployment insurance (and many had trouble accessing emergency unemployment benefits because of outdated state systems). Further, many workers around the country who had job-related health insurance lost it just when they needed it most (Cooper and Worker 2020; Bivens and Zipperer 2020). While Congress passed relief measures earlier in the pandemic, some key components of relief—such as the extended unemployment benefits—have expired, and further measures are at this writing stalled in Congress (Gould 2020a; Shierholz 2020). Not granting the needed economic relief and not granting more support for families is going to add to the challenges of parents who have dual responsibilities of supervising children’s learning and putting food on the table and providing them with health protection.

Evidence on expanded opportunity gaps due to health challenges for families

The pandemic obviously also raises the possibility that children’s families and children themselves are grappling with illness and even death. Research shows that the health risks are higher for workers in low-paying professions than for workers in high-paying professions because the former are much less likely to be able to work remotely (Gould and Shierholz 2020). Moreover, essential workers—such as warehouse stockers, home health aides, and delivery and trash truck drivers—now risk contracting COVID-19 while still struggling to survive on low wages. 34

Thus it is not surprising that this crisis has also resulted in an increase in the number of children who face the serious illness or death of a relative. It seems likely that a large share of low-income students and Black and Hispanic students now resuming schooling have suffered major trauma. With Black students losing family members in disproportionate numbers, the pandemic is exacting a particular toll on these communities (Harper 2020). For example, in Georgia, where African Americans make up just 30% of the state’s population, they represent over 80% of COVID-19-related hospitalizations and more than 50% of deaths (Weiner 2020). When New York City was the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, the heavily white borough of Manhattan had a hospitalization rate of 3.31% and a death rate of 1.22%—the city’s lowest—despite having the oldest residents of any of the city’s five boroughs, while the heavily low-income, African American borough of the Bronx had the highest rates, 2.24% and 6.34%, roughly double those of Manhattan (Wadhera et al. 2020). 35

Evidence on expanded opportunity gaps due to health challenges for students

These same groups of students—Black and Hispanic students, and low-income students— suffer academically due to physical and mental health problems that are less likely to be addressed in a timely and consistent manner (Ghandour et al. 2018; Menas 2019; Morsy and Rothstein 2019). Many rely on school-based health clinics, a critical resource that is no longer available in schools where teaching is not occurring on site. Earlier in the pandemic when access to doctors’ offices was severely limited (with many serving only urgent cases) and hospitals were overwhelmed (and perceived as unsafe), problems from toothaches and ear infections to emotional breakdowns went untreated and, in many cases, became much worse. When the state of Florida shut down in late March, for example, it banned all nonemergency medical and dental services, leading to questions as to whether even check-ups conducted prior to procedures were permitted (Boca News Now 2020). 36

With both physical and mental health on the line for stressed-out students, school districts are trying to leverage newly available resources to compensate. These include additional Medicaid resources provided in the first federal COVID-19 relief legislation, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. That act temporarily increases the federal Medicaid match to states that agree to maintain current eligibility standards and cost-sharing requirements and limit disenrollment. Relaxed guidelines enable states to use some of that money for telehealth services without additional authorization, so students can see doctors remotely as needed. The federal CARES Act that was enacted in March provides $13.2 billion for K–12 schools as part of Title I funding, and it includes several aspects of student health in allowable uses. The Los Angeles Unified School District has used some of that funding to launch a mental health hotline for students. Superintendent Austi Beutner notes, “Their world has been turned upside down and we need to make sure students have the support they need [during this crisis]” (Jordan 2020a).

All of the above challenges, of course, mean more stress. And for children who were already living in cramped and less-than-ideal situations, having all family members in the house makes the regular challenges of daily life much greater. Increased incidences of abuse due to confinement, stress, and lack of access to outside support further affirm the urgency of addressing the stressors that are affecting families and, in turn, their children’s development and ability to learn (Stratford 2020; Greeley 2020; Tolerance Trauma 2020).

The pandemic has exacerbated opportunity gaps in teaching and learning

It is in these challenging contexts of economic insecurity and housing instability that students (and teachers) were suddenly transitioning to remote learning, adding another class- and race-based disparity in education opportunity: the “digital divide.” The “digital divide” refers to the fact that some children do not have access to the devices or internet services needed to operate online—and there is a double digital divide that arises from the fact that low-income children and Black and Hispanic children are more likely to lack this access (García, Weiss, and Engdahl 2020; Tinubu Ali and Herrera 2020). Research on the digital divide counters the idea that all children can access online instruction and the education system shifted to online education. Given the resurgence of COVID-19 cases over the summer and the growing number of school districts announcing plans to begin the 2020–2021 school year totally remotely, the divide would only continue in the imminent future. Some low-income families are struggling to obtain a computer or other device for each child, with a share of families lacking an internet connection enabling children to do assigned work online or a quiet space to do solo work (let alone attend the Zoom calls that classrooms are now conducting; see Hodges et al. 2020).

Our analysis of data from the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that digital devices are not universally available or used at home for school-related purposes. Our findings are presented in Figure D . Specifically, 84.4% of eighth graders overall, and 76.3% of poor eighth graders have a laptop or computer, which means that about 16% of eighth graders and 25% of poor eighth graders have no desktop or laptop at home. In addition, only about half of eighth graders had experience using the internet at home frequently for homework, with a much larger share of non-poor students (56.1%) than poor students (46.4%) accustomed to using the home internet frequently for homework (a gap of 10 percentage points). (We define poor students as students who are eligible for the federal free or reduced-price lunch programs, and non-poor students as students who are ineligible for those programs.) 37

Not all students are set up for online learning, and students who are poor have less access to key tools : Share of eighth-graders with access to online learning, by income level and tool, 2017

Notes:  Poor students are students eligible for the federal free or reduced-price lunch programs. Non-poor students are students who are ineligible for those programs. Frequent use of internet at home for homework means every day or almost every day. Students’ teachers were either “already proficient” in, “have not” received training in, or “had received training” in “software applications” and “integrating computers into instruction” in the last two years.

Source:  2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), eighth-grade reading sample microdata from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Chart adapted from Figure D in García, Weiss, and Engdahl 2020.

Our analysis of 2017 NAEP data also shows that teachers are not universally prepared to teach online, as also shown in Figure D. Just about a third (32.5%) of eighth graders overall have teachers who consider themselves proficient in using software applications, and only a fifth (19.3%) have teachers who consider themselves proficient in integrating computers into instruction. The shares of students overall with teachers who don’t consider themselves proficient but who have received some training in applications and in computer use in instruction are higher (43.4% and 69.2% respectively). Yet that still leaves nearly a quarter (100% minus 43.4% minus 32.5%, or 24.1%) of eighth graders with teachers who are neither proficient in nor trained in software applications, and close to one in eight (100% minus 69.2% minus 19.3%, or 11.5%) with teachers who are neither proficient in nor trained in how to integrate computers into instruction.

A Southern Education Foundation report on class- and race-based disparities during the COVID-19 crisis finds similar disparities in access to the resources needed for online learning. It notes that nearly one in five African American children and a slightly greater share of children in low-income households have no access to the internet at home (Tinubu Ali and Herrera 2020). These disparities mirror those reported by superintendents who responded to a survey by AASA, the School Superintendents Association, in late March as schools across the country were closing down (Rogers and Ellerson Ng 2020). 38 Numerous news outlets reporting on the digital divide have also noted these disparities by race and ethnicity (for example, see Kamenetz 2020b). School shutdowns and associated internet- and device-access challenges have been occurring at a time when many of the public libraries that have been a resource for families without computers or home internet access are closed due to the pandemic.

School districts are trying hard to take these challenges into consideration and to make up for the large disparities they know their students face. Some, like Montgomery County, Maryland, are sending home Chromebooks and tablets, prioritizing students who are eligible for free- and reduced-price lunches or are known not to have devices at home (St. George 2020). Others, like New York City, are lending iPads to students who need them (NYC Department of Education 2020). All of this takes time, however, and many districts lack the resources. (Montgomery County provided paper packets to students for the first few weeks of closures, until it could distribute the Chromebooks.) Some districts are making online work optional, as a way to not further disadvantage students who physically cannot do it, but of course that can weaken schools’ capacity to continue to instruct.

Tinubu Ali and Herrera (2020) also report on dozens of innovative strategies districts have employed to overcome some of these disparities. These strategies include deploying roving school buses that add Wi-Fi coverage in South Carolina, the purchase of thousands of additional hotspots in Texas, and two months of free internet in Caldo Parish in Louisiana thanks to a partnership between Comcast and the local NAACP. (Comcast is also providing free access in Montgomery County, Maryland.) In Tennessee, Staples is printing and distributing printed materials free of charge to students who cannot afford the cost, and public schools in Jackson, Mississippi, are developing a package of learning materials that are paper-based or online and shared via the state’s educational programming television channels. South Carolina’s public television network is providing free virtual professional development sessions on home learning and technology best practices. In Miami-Dade, one of the most diverse school districts in the country, instructions for families are provided in English, Spanish, and Creole.

The pandemic has exacerbated the limitations of standardized tests

Digital divides and disparities in parental resources are fueling the growth of opportunity gaps that likely will make it harder for disadvantaged students to engage with their schoolwork and easier for these students to lose interest in school. If so, the pandemic will also widen performance gaps between disadvantaged students and their better-off peers and increase graduation and school dropout rates among disadvantaged students, particularly if districts don’t adjust practices to reconnect with these students.

Thus, one practice that may need adjusting or revisiting is testing. During the pandemic, traditional assessments—which have limited value even in normal contexts—are much less useful in capturing what students know and have learned. These assessments could feel “overwhelming or condemning to children” at a time when it is necessary to create opportunities for students to show what they know and to demonstrate where they are, and for teachers to adjust instruction to students’ current development in order to advance their development and potential (RESEARCHED 2020, NPE 2020). As set forth above, students have very uneven access to the online resources they need to take tests, let alone complete them effectively. Similarly, students have uneven access to the special instruction and supervised practice that help students pass these tests—with lower income students and Black and Hispanic students less likely to have access than their higher income and white peers. This means that standardized testing during the pandemic will deliver results that are, by design, going to be even more closely correlated with life circumstances than is true during periods of regular classroom instruction. Compounding all of the barriers to meaningful and equitable monitoring and testing during the pandemic, teachers in remote settings lack the tools that they have when they are in their classrooms to interpret test results. In other words, in a classroom, teachers are more able to distinguish between a low score likely due to the student’s lack of understanding of the material versus a low score due to the student’s frequent absences, emotional distress, or other factors. As a result, teachers working remotely are hard-pressed to respond to a test score with an appropriate strategy to support the student.

For all of these reasons, traditional standardized tests have limited value in this context and may do more harm than good. 39 Rather, school districts should be using tests that are designed to assess where students are across a range of areas and to help teachers meet students there. These tests include diagnostic tests, formative tests, SEL assessments, and assessments that can be performed remotely such as project-based assessments and capstone projects. 40 These types of tests will be critical to helping students and teachers alike start to dig out of the academic hole dug by the COVID-19 shovel.

Going forward: Translating what we have learned into a plan for the “three Rs” of relief, recovery, and rebuilding

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, we have made choices about how to sustain, or provide relief to, the education system. We have also had the opportunity to consider how best to proceed as we start to recover, and how to rebuild the system by taking more decisive action on substantial, long-needed changes. Indeed, how well we rebuild the education system will determine how well we address the impacts the pandemic has had on our human capital and how prepared we are for shocks of this nature in the future.

As noted above, students have seen their normal learning and development interrupted and disrupted. Inevitably, this will lead to lost ground during the pandemic, with disadvantaged students particularly vulnerable given the way that the pandemic has compounded large existing opportunity gaps. We propose a set of targeted education interventions and comprehensive services to lift up disadvantaged children and reduce inequities as we move out from this pandemic. This plan tackles today’s three Rs — relief, recovery, and rebuilding —with a phased three-stage process that must be properly funded at each stage.

Specifically, this three-pronged plan requires making the necessary investments to 1) put school systems on a solid footing to provide effective remote instruction and supports at scale as the crisis continues to play out (the “relief” phase); 2) make new investments to help schools and students compensate for lost time and ground during the period of quarantine (during the “recovery” phase); and 3) lay the foundations for a shift toward an education system that understands the complexity of education production and its multiple components, untaps children’s talents, works equally for all students, and reflects the value we place on education as a society (in the “rebuilding” phase). This plan will require substantial amounts of resources and strong collaboration and effort.

If the Great Recession is any indicator, competition for resources will be fierce. In fact, early indicators are that this public health crisis will pose enormous challenges for states and local governments, those responsible for over 90% of the school systems’ revenue. 41 Moreover, we entered this crisis in a more difficult position than in the Great Recession (based on a comparison with what we learned from the 2009 federal stimulus, and from the fact that about half of the states as of 2016 had yet to return to the level of per-student spending that they had attained prior to the Great Recession). 42

With state budgets at historic crisis levels and the economy continuing to struggle, 43 the prevailing narrative will likely be an even more severe version of “we can’t afford that” than what we experienced in the aftermath of the Great Recession. It will therefore be more important than ever to meet that assertion with the fact that “we can’t afford not to.” All of the evidence we have amassed demonstrates that not spending costs far more, and delivers far less, in the long run, than making the needed investments. 44

Underlying the fiscal barriers to making the needed investments in education is a lack of leadership at the federal level that makes it very difficult for states to do what is needed. So far, there has been insufficient, scattered attention to education from policymakers, but even that has had a marked political tone that fails to acknowledge challenges or provide required resources. 45

Relief: Give schools urgent resources so that they can provide effective remote instruction and supports at scale during the pandemic

During the pandemic, schools have been challenged with not only fulfilling their main roles of educating our children but also serving as a key part of the safety net: Specifically, to some degree, schools have provided not just remote education but also supports like meals, health services, counseling, and, in some cases, housing. Given the fact the schools are not universally going to be resuming standard operating procedures in the foreseeable future, policies must be enacted to enable all schools to provide effective remote instruction and supports consistently, and at scale.

While states and school districts are critical players in the relief stage, most of the calls for action involve the federal government because states and school districts are not only overstrained but also facing imminent budget cuts caused by the pandemic, with an inability to incur deficit spending.

Congress must resume consideration of additional relief measures and pay more attention to schools and associated public supports, including child care, social services, food and nutrition supports, and physical and mental health care—devoting substantially larger shares of, and sufficient, funding to these needs. At a minimum:

• Every school must be equipped and have the necessary resources, in conjunction with both public and private community institutions, to feed children (and, as relevant, their families) for as long as the current crisis demands.
• These needed services include the various wraparound supports specific to physical and mental health services, and to countering the various negative impacts of the crisis on the mental and emotional health of both students and educators.
• During the first months of the pandemic, the lack of preparation to cope with the lockdowns meant that many children lost access to the most basic needs. School districts must coordinate with state and local agencies and partner organizations to assess students’ needs so that districts understand their students’ situations and can respond accordingly.
• Unlike during the first months into the pandemic, access to online education must be universal.
• Schools must be equipped to do needs-based monitoring of students’ status in terms of internet access; their access to computers and other technology tools for online learning; and students’ capacity to make effective use of the tools they have. This type of diagnostic assessment of technology and access is critical to understanding the degree to which students can engage with instruction on a regular basis and is foundational to their ability to learn.
• District and school leaders should provide teachers with the necessary training and preparation to avoid unstructured instruction and the kind of “trial-and-error” instruction many had to employ during the first months of the pandemic.
• District and school leaders should survey teachers as to the specific professional development and other supports they need to teach effectively in these adapted contexts, and Congress should allocate federal aid to ensure that all teachers obtain the needed support. 47
• Given that many teachers, like other “essential workers,” must balance instruction with attending to other household realities, including parenting their own children, Congress should ensure that support for child care is included in key relief measures. 48

In the “relief” phase, schools must also have the resources they need to safely operate with partial on-site instruction if the health protocols allow for doing so.

• These plans at the very least must include communicating, educating, and reinforcing appropriate hygiene and social distancing practices in ways that are developmentally appropriate for students, teachers, and staff; maintaining healthy environments (e.g., cleaning and disinfecting frequently touched surfaces); repurposing unused or underutilized school (or community) spaces to increase classroom space and facilitate social distancing, including outside spaces, where feasible; developing a proactive plan for when a student or staff member tests positive for COVID-19; conducting case tracing in the event of a positive case; etc.
• Every school district must receive the resources to ensure the safety guidelines are disseminated, understood, and followed. Ensuring that guidelines are followed includes providing the financial resources and the equipment so that members of the school community are protected, the facilities are cleaned, and staff members have what they need to be safe. 50

Recovery: Provide extra investments to help students and schools make up lost ground as they return to in-school operations

When schools resume their operations back in the classroom, it will be critical to fully understand which students have been engaged and to what degree, how much they have learned, and where they have fallen behind. But for meaningful teaching and learning to take place, educators must first be able to assess their students’ well-being and readiness to learn. Once they achieve that, educators will need sufficient, appropriate resources and tools to enable students to catch up and continue their development.

• Careful use of well-designed diagnostic tests will be critical to preparing and equipping schools and teachers to do their jobs, which will include adjusting instruction as necessary, and thus to helping students make up for disrupted education.
• Using diagnostic assessments to assess the needs of the pandemic can provide a model for using assessments more appropriately in the future—i.e., as formative and informative tools of teaching and learning, rather than as evaluative tools of judgment. 52
• Educators must receive training not just on diagnostic testing but also on benchmark testing, project-based learning, capstone projects, and performance assessments, with a focus on remote instruction and trauma-based instruction. 53
• COVID-19 is expected to boost early retirements, especially among teachers who are closer to retirement and among those in the highest-risk groups, and voluntary attrition, especially among those teachers who faced major obstacles in their work during the first months of the pandemic. These risks could also affect other staff at schools (e.g., nurses, paraprofessionals, principals) and come at a time when more personnel are needed. Budget constraints could further deplete the teaching and education workforces. 54
• Flexible approaches will be necessary: Children learn differently, and they underwent different challenges during the pandemic. Remote learning is less effective for children who are less prepared (i.e., without full access to computers and other equipment, without experience using devices for school work, with fewer supports, and with less likelihood of being engaged).
• More intensive interventions and strategies will be needed for students identified as at heightened risk of dropping out altogether.
• Providing more flexible and personalized interventions for students will require more, better, and targeted investments in professional development for teachers so that they are equipped to deliver personalized learning.
• The coronavirus crisis created serious challenges to students’ well-being and development that require a response focusing on their social and emotional learning, health, and well-being. 55
• Through their positive relationships with students, and through more specialized knowledge about social and emotional learning (SEL), teachers can contribute to the social and emotional learning of students. Therefore, improving training and support for teachers, teachers’ aides, and other school staff members in SEL will be critical to helping students regain their footing after the coronavirus crisis.
• Supporting students’ social and emotional development will also require increasing the number of school nurses (clinics), counselors, social workers, paraprofessionals, etc., with a focus on both students’ social and emotional learning and their mental and physical health. Other practices at school (curriculums, etc.) can be enhanced to support social and emotional learning.
• Schools should consider increasing both the amount and quality of learning time through a number of options, including extended schedules (in particular for those students lagging behind), summer enrichment programs that support the whole child, and staffing strategies that reduce class sizes and staff schools with sufficient and highly credentialed educators, 56 including teachers’ aides and tutors, whether in person or online.
• Schools should also consider ensuring access to and quality of online instruction, if online education is going to be used on its own or in conjunction with traditional instruction. In keeping with the recommendations in the “relief” section above, online instruction needs to be better tailored (especially for those who are least prepared), of high-quality, and accessible to all students. Similarly, schools need to provide supports for teachers who had not been prepared on how to use technology for instruction. Teachers should be enlisted in helping to create online instructional tools and policies. 57 Finally, districts and teachers must apply “an equity lens,” to target tools and resources to students who experience the biggest opportunity gaps (i.e., students who lack digital access or who suffer more from nutrition challenges or housing instability).

Rebuilding: Redesign the system to focus on nurturing the whole child and on equal provision of opportunities

Major crises provide unique opportunities to rethink the status quo. In the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis, policymakers must seize the opportunity to address structural problems in the educational system and invest new and different approaches. This should be a pathway toward establishing a system that ensures we meet the student, teacher, and school needs that we have been neglecting and make delivering excellence and equity in education the norm. Delivering equity in education requires addressing the major disparities in student outcomes by race and social class that arise in a system designed to deliver disparities in educational opportunities. The bottom line is, we must seize this moment to redesign the system to deliver the excellence and equity needed for every child to be able to thrive. 58

• Going forward, the education system must better balance what we teach, how we teach it, and how we reward the full range of skills that matter for and define a child’s development and education. The institutions that create education policy and practice must make many changes to ensure that schools teach and reward the development of cognitive and socioemotional skills. The shift begins with recognizing that skills of both types are mutually supportive, not mutually exclusive. 59
• For example, a whole-child approach that embraces and employs a broader range of assessments, and uses these assessments for “formative and informative” purposes, rather than for judging and sorting students, would also go a long way to closing the gaps. This shift recognizes that traditional tests are designed to capture only a narrow slice of what children know and can do, and that these tests are biased toward the types of skills that are closely correlated with parents’ socioeconomic status, not necessarily, and not exclusively, children’s potential.
• School districts must conduct a detailed needs assessment of the district overall and of each school in the district, identifying where poverty and all other stressors that are intertwined with poverty impact the ability of children to learn, and mapping out community resources that can be leveraged to meet those needs. And it means working through a variety of channels (and with a variety of partners) to close the opportunity and enrichment gaps that have long impeded progress for low-income students, students of color, and students from immigrant families and communities. 60
• Education systems must tackle head-on the school- and district-based disparities that mirror and compound the disparities that children experience at home. In high-poverty schools, and in schools serving larger shares of minority students, there is generally less access to the education “inputs” that lead to good outcomes, whether it is highly credentialed teachers, access to after-school programs, access to AP classes, positive ways of dealing with discipline issues, etc. A broad range of tools and resources must be deployed to close gaps by types of school on all fronts, making education funding more adequate and more equitable.
• School systems and their community partners must also establish a flexible set of strategies to offer wraparound supports—such as health clinics, community gardens, and parenting classes—tailored to the specific features of the community and the diversity of the communities serving our 55 million students across the country.
• All the institutions in the education system and society at large must value education and educators and treat teachers as professionals. Teachers’ judgement is critical to identifying what children and educators need. School districts and education institutions must improve the types and usefulness of the professional development and supports offered to teachers, to allow them to keep up with advances in research on effective teaching and face the challenges of the job. Teachers must also be given more of a say in the decisions affecting their jobs and careers, from the materials they use in their classrooms to the types of training they receive. Valuing educators also includes paying them at a level commensurate with what similar college-educated workers earn in other professions. Research shows that taking these steps can help attract professionals to teaching as a career and help prevent them from retiring or quitting their schools and the profession. 61
• Policymakers must recognize that education policy alone cannot ensure that all children have the foundation they need to get a good education. We need an economic agenda to accompany the rebuilding that lifts all children up and closes the opportunity gaps that are educational and not educational in nature. Children in low-income families—often children of color—lack many of the resources that their higher income and white peers have, which puts them at a disadvantage before they even enter their classrooms. Some opportunity gaps can be addressed by strengthened education policies. But the ones of a different nature would call for better public policies and a stronger economic agenda. 62
• Finally, policymakers at all levels must establish and fund contingency plans for the next time we experience a crisis as disruptive and overwhelming as the coronavirus pandemic, whether that occurs in the next handful of years or further into the future.

Despite the fact that we do not know exactly how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting children’s needs and academic performance, we know enough from existing research on learning during somewhat comparable educational experiences, and from news and observations of how education is being produced during the crisis, to assess the likely consequences on educational outcomes both overall and for relatively disadvantaged subgroups.

We reviewed the research on what to expect when children experience a substantial loss of learning time, when schools make a sudden shift to remote learning and home schooling without meeting the conditions for their effectiveness, and when circumstances lead to a massive increase in stress and disruption for children and their families. We also reviewed evidence that has emerged during the crisis on the multiple challenges that children, their teachers, schools, families, and communities face, all of which exacerbate opportunity gaps. Indeed, the evidence points to disparities in opportunities that exacerbate existing inequities and place major stress on low-income students and their teachers, in particular. Due to the digital divide and many other factors, these children are most likely to lose more substantial learning time. And their families are also most likely to experience compounded stresses—such as job loss, the loss of health care, the lack of paid sick leave, the lack of child care, and the need to work on site in “essential” jobs that put them at health risks: all these factors make it much harder for these families to attend to children who are suddenly home schooling and struggling with ad-hoc efforts at remote learning.

Together, the lessons learned point to the need to enact an agenda that lifts up children and reduces educational inequities after the interruption to schooling due to the coronavirus is over. The agenda must also rebuild the system so that lifting up children and reducing inequities in education become the new norm. To accomplish this, we outline a three-stage response. The first stage is immediate relief for students and educators so they can function better in the early 2020–2021 school year as remote learning continues in some form for many children. The second stage is significant short-term investments during the recovery that will enable students whose education was interrupted by the coronavirus crisis to catch up and continue their development. The third stage is longer-term reforms to rebuild the education system so that the challenges documented here are corrected and the system finally delivers an excellent, equitable education to all children.

In the rebuilding phase, it is essential to establish an education system that embraces a whole-child approach, addresses the impacts of poverty and inequality on students’ capacity to learn and on teachers’ abilities to do their jobs, offers a flexible set of wraparound supports to mitigate the impacts of the inequities that are built into the system, values education and educators, and creates viable contingency plans for future crises.

In closing, the ultimate consequences of the pandemic for K–12 education in the United States will indeed be a function of the quality, intensity, and comprehensiveness of our response to counter the pandemic’s negative lasting effects. Indeed, our call for relief, recovery, and reform has a historical precedent. As Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, recently noted:

During the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt affirmed the need for relief, recovery, and reform—in that order. Today, we must follow these same steps—beyond reform to a broader, deeper reimagination of our society. (Darren Walker 2020).

This societal reimagination certainly encompasses a reimagination of our education system. With the right vision, we can actually ensure that public education plays a critical role in restoring the human and social capital in our country and in readying us for the next challenges, big or small, that we may confront in the future. Our children and our future depend on it.

About the authors

Emma García  is an education economist at the Economic Policy Institute, where she specializes in the economics of education and education policy. Her research focuses on the production of education (cognitive and noncognitive skills), evaluation of educational interventions (early childhood, K–12, and higher education), equity, returns to education, teacher labor markets, and cost analysis in education. She has held research positions at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education, the Campaign for Educational Equity, the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, and the Community College Research Center; consulted for MDRC, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the National Institute for Early Education Research; and served as an adjunct faculty member at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. in economics and education from Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Elaine Weiss  is the lead policy analyst for income security at the National Academy of Social Insurance, where she spearheads projects on Social Security, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation. Prior to her work at the academy, Weiss was the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach (BBA) to Education, a campaign launched by the Economic Policy Institute, from 2011 to 2017. BBA promoted a comprehensive, evidence-based set of policies to allow all children to thrive in school and life. Weiss has co-authored and authored EPI and BBA reports on early achievement gaps and the flaws in market-oriented education reforms. She is co-author of  Broader, Bolder, Better , a book with former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville published by Harvard Education Press . Weiss came to BBA from the Pew Charitable Trusts, where she served as project manager for Pew’s Partnership for America’s Economic Success campaign. She has a Ph.D. in public policy from the George Washington University Trachtenberg School and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to EPI Publications Director Lora Engdahl for having edited this report, as well as for co-authoring one of the pieces this report builds on, and for her suggestions on news reports that provide useful context. To the last point, we also acknowledge the extensive work on the repercussions of COVID-19 for education conducted by many of our colleagues, of which we are only able to cite a fraction. We appreciate EPI Vice President John Schmitt’s supervision and support of this project, EPI Research Assistant Melat Kassa for her assistance with the tables and figures, and EPI’s communications staff for their assistance with the production and dissemination of this study.

1. For references on production of education, see Coleman et al. 1966; Hanushek 1979; Todd and Wolpin 2003.

2. Note, too, that we do not offer an in-depth review of these very extensive bodies of work, but rather use them to better understand what it is at play and to frame what we should anticipate the next-phase and post-pandemic outcomes to look like.

3. Students in grades kindergarten and first, for example, experienced larger gains as measured by the ECLS-K assessments in math and reading between the fall and the spring of those years. For example, our descriptive analysis of the ECLS-K 2010–2011 data suggests that students gain an average of 0.7 SD in kindergarten. For a discussion on spring to spring gains by grades (average of 0.45 SD across grades), see Bloom et al. 2008.

4. These kinds of challenges and trade-offs may also be relevant to the decisions schools will need to make for 2020–2021. For example, von Hippel (2020), when discussing school instruction that spans 12 months, explains that although year-round calendars increase summer learning, in most cases they reduce learning at other times of year, so that the total amount learned over a 12-month period is no greater under a year-round calendar than under a nine-month calendar.

5. Assessing a seminal study by Alexander, Entwisle, and Olson (2007), based on a sample of Baltimore students who were tracked from first grade in 1982 to age 22, Kuhfel explains that most of the test-score gap by socioeconomic status (SES) in ninth grade was explained by “differing summer experiences in the early elementary years.”

6. The more recent research also discusses several technical challenges that would require some concern about the findings. For example, there were characteristics of the tests used to assess skills before and after the summer that made them not comparable, or that made the tests more difficult in the fall than in the spring; very small samples in particular contexts; and other caveats. See von Hippel and Hamrock (2019) and von Hippel, Workman, and Downey (2018).

7. Atteberry and McEachin (2020) find that slightly over half of the students lose nearly all their school-year progress but the rest of the students actually maintain their school-year learning. Kuhfeld (2019) similarly finds that the summer loss is not generalized, but points to a larger loss overall, with around 60–80% of students losing ground in the elementary school grades (and an even larger share with respect to math). Kuhfeld (2019) also finds that the slide is larger in higher grades than in lower grades, and that performance gaps between minority and nonminority students did not increase, but gaps between students in high-poverty versus low-poverty schools increased significantly but by a small amount (at most, students in high-poverty schools lost one week of learning). The two studies (Atteberry and McEachin 2020 and Kuhfeld 2019) use the NWEA’s MAP Growth reading and math assessments. von Hippel, Workman, and Downey (2018) estimate that during the summer, performance gaps by socioeconomic status slightly increase for children in their first years in school. Our own exploratory analysis of the ECLS-K 2010–2011 data coincides with finding most students experience gains during the summers (both in math and reading), and that the performance gaps widen between low- and high-income children (using household income as a proxy for socioeconomic status). See also Quinn et al. 2016.

8. Definitions of chronic absenteeism vary by study, school district, etc. They typically are based on the number of days or a share of days missed over an entire school year, and they are only available on a yearly basis. For example, the U.S. Department of Education (2016) defines chronically absent students as those who “miss at least 15 days of school in a year.” Elsewhere, chronic absenteeism is frequently defined as missing 10% or more of the total number of days the student is enrolled in school or missing a month or more of school in the previous year (Ehrlich et al. 2013; Balfanz and Byrnes 2012).

9. Some examples are J-PAL 2017, Jordan 2019, and Balu 2019.

10. This 1.5 million figure is of course not completely illustrative today because overall enrollment numbers are expected to have grown since 2010. As a related reference, the National Center for Education Statistics estimates that there were 656 virtual schools in the U.S. in 2017–2018, enrolling about 279,000 students (0.55 percent of total enrollment) (NCES 2019b).

11. The literature on use of devices for education covers a lot of ground: findings tend to be a function of the type of technology/device used, the intensity, the developmental period/age, etc. (Crone and Konijn 2018; Walsh et al. 2018, see a summary in García 2018). To illustrate a few of these associations, researchers have found that time spent using a mobile phone and watching TV and sending text messages is correlated with lower achievement, slower reading times, and more intuitive but less analytic thinking, and it is also correlated with a faster but less accurate performance in a test of selective attention capacity and skills, as well as in processing-speed ability (Evans-Schmidt and Vandewater 2008; Lepp, Barkley, and Karpinski 2014; Fox, Rosen, and Crawford 2009; Barr et al. 2015; Abramson et al. 2009). Video-gaming can positively influence visual attention and spatial skills (attention capacity, quicker attention deployment, and faster processing,  according to Evans-Schmidt and Vandewater 2008). More frequent use of social media is negatively correlated with grade point averages (GPA), academic performance, and hours per week spent studying (Junco 2012; Karpinski et al. 2012; Kirschner and Karpinski 2010). Texting, using Facebook (and accessing Facebook while studying), and conducting internet searches unrelated to academic activity concurrent with homework completion all negatively correlate with GPA (Junco and Cotten 2012; Rosen, Carrier, and Cheever 2013; Wilmer, Sherman and Chein 2017). Media use (including social media) positively correlates with social and emotional learning (SEL) development, relationships with peers, and engagement, but also with addiction, bullying, mood and self-esteem problems, and time not sleeping/exercising/studying, some due to the trade-offs between time spent on some of these activities (Crone and Konijn 2018; Lemola et al. 2015; American Academy of Pediatrics 2011). The evidence also points out that if the content watched is high-quality educational programming, and does not displace other cognitively enriching experiences, screen time is positively correlated with achievement, engagement, and attitudes toward learning (Evans-Schmidt and Vandewater 2008). Concerns with excessive screen time have been well covered in the media during the months of the pandemic. See for example Kamenetz 2020a; Cheng and Wilkinson 2020.

12. Some information for households with children during the pandemic has been released by the U.S. Census Bureau through the Household Pulse Survey Tables for a target population of adults 18 years and older. See U.S. Census Bureau 2020a.

13. They say: “These students’ learning and persistence outcomes are worse when they take online courses than they would have been had these same students taken in-person courses.” See Zhao 2020 for some discussion of the challenges around online learning. NCES has used this period to build a repository of this research, which is discussed in Soldner 2020.

14. One in three online charter schools reported that all of their courses were self-paced. On average, online charter schools provide less simultaneous learning and teaching in a week than conventional schools would have in a day and less one-on-one instruction, with larger student-to-teacher ratios. Principals in these schools reported that the greatest challenge was student engagement (a challenge cited almost three times as often as any other issue) (Gill et al. 2015). Based on national data, across all tested students in online charters, the typical annual academic losses are -0.25 SD for math and -0.10 SD for reading (Woodworth et al. 2015). See Bueno 2020 for a more updated study of full-time virtual school attendance in Georgia, which shows negative effects ranging from -0.1 to -0.4 SD on performance.

15. This share has been relatively stable since 2007.

16. Subjects tested include reading, language l, mathematics (with computation), science, social studies, core (with computation), and composite (with computation).

17. As researchers note, the evidence is limited by the inability to use experimental or even quasi-experimental methods, precluding them from drawing conclusions as to causality (Belfield 2004; Cheng and Donnelly 2019; Lubienski, Pukett, and Brewer 2013). Belfield (2004) explains the three empirical issues that arise when comparing outcomes from home schooling against public schooling: 1) the common concern over the endogeneity of school choice, that is different types of families choose the type of school that their children attend, and little can be inferred about the impacts of schools for students who do not attend them; 2) the need to distinguish the absolute performance of home-schoolers from the treatment effect of home schooling—“Given the above-median resources of many home-schooling families, academic performance should be high even if home schooling itself is not differentially effective. Full controls for family background are needed, however, to identify a treatment effect”; 3) “home-schoolers can often choose which tests to take and when to take them (and have parents administer them), introducing other biases.”

18. Bacher-Hicks, Goodman, and Mulhern (2020) examine the search for online learning platforms used by schools and supplemental resources on Google. They find that the search intensity had roughly doubled relative to baseline. (They also find that the intensity rose twice as much in areas with above-median SES as in areas with below-median SES, where SES is measures by household income, parental education, and computer and internet access.

19. This lack of time for planning has in a way continued during the summer. As the news reports have broadly shown, many schools were going to reopen but they had to cancel at the last minute, which probably meant that the plans in place were no longer aligned with students’ and teachers’ needs. In other cases, the uncertainty about resources available (as discussed later in the report) led to a squandered opportunity to plan accordingly.

20. The authors point to the nine factors that determine the quality of online teaching and learning, including modality, pacing, student-instructor ratio, pedagogy (type), role of online assessments, students’ online roles, instructors’ online roles, online communication synchrony, and source of feedback. While all may not apply as strongly in K–12 education, the range of considerations highlights the challenges public school teachers will face in attempting to make remote instruction effective.

21. More broadly, these aspects about online instruction also touch upon the relevance of teacher professional development, the importance of establishing learning communities for teachers, and teachers’ access to a sound system of supports (Darling-Hammond et al. 2017; Kraft, Blazar, and Hogan 2018; García and Weiss 2019). Among other advantages, learning communities allow teachers to acquire new skills, update their knowledge, and strengthen their practice and effectiveness in the classroom, all critically important factors for education quality and also for the stability of the teaching workforce (García and Weiss 2019).

22. As we explained in our study, the professional development module that delivered data for the 2011–2012 SASS is rotating and was not included in the most recent data set available when we were conducting our study (2015–2016), but it will be in the next cycle, 2017–2018.

23. Teachers also reported having very little input on which activities to undertake for their professional development. Only 11.1 percent of teachers have a great deal of influence determining the content of in-service professional development programs. As we noted in García and Weiss 2019, this disregard for teachers’ input is quite troubling, given national and international surveys and testimonies showing that teachers want to play a more direct role in selecting the types and content of professional development opportunities offered to them (see Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 2014; Loewus 2019; OECD 2019; Kirk 2019; Schwartz 2019).

24. For example, in Washington, D.C., the school district has indicated attendance is compulsory for students ages 5–17. Schools will use daily attendance as an indicator of student engagement in learning together with information on completing assignments and participation in live classes (District of Columbia Office of the Mayor 2020).

25. This sharply academic focus narrowed with the 2001 passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which replaced the earlier version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The 2015 passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act attempted to dial back that pressure (see CASEL 2020; Kostyo, Cardichon, and Darling-Hammond 2018). Useful references on these issues and some others discussed below are Bloom 1964; Borghans et al. 2008; Duckworth and Yeager 2015; Levin 2012; Jones et al. 2016; Jones et al. 2019; Shonkoff and Phillips 2000; Lippman et al. 2015; Petway, Brenneman, and Kyllonen 2016; UNESCO’s Incheon Declaration for Education 2030 (UNESCO et al. 2016); and our own work on these issues: García 2014; García and Weiss 2016.

26. For those interested in this approach, Tirivayi et al. (2020) offer a comprehensive examination of past public policy responses to emergency crises.

27. Technically, this is known as lack of external validity. This research documents that approximately 50 million primary- and lower-secondary-age children are out of school in conflict-affected countries around the world (Save the Children 2013). Natural disasters, which also displace large numbers of students, are four times as prevalent today as they were in the 1980s, likely due to the growing impacts of climate change, and that number is predicted to increase exponentially in the next 20 years (Oxfam International 2007; Save the Children 2008; USAID 2014).

28. Further, research has explored the effects on the communities to which children and their families migrate (known as spillover effects from emergency migrants on the host communities), as well as some of the factors that explain them. Hurricane Maria in September 2017 caused a large influx of students from Puerto Rico to Florida’s public schools—about 12,000 students between October 2017 and May 2018. Studies found immediate negative effects on the performance outcomes of host students (students in the schools accepting new students from the disaster area) following hurricane Maria. Studies also found immediate negative effects on the performance outcomes of host students following Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, though they found zero effects on Florida’s public schools following the Haitian migrant influx after the earthquake in January 2010 and two years after it (Özek 2020; Imberman, Kugler, and Sacerdote 2012; Figlio and Özek 2019). Özek (2020) found significant adverse effects of hurricane migrants on the educational outcomes of existing students in the first year. Specifically, he found that a 5-percentage-point increase in the share of hurricane migrants reduced test scores in math and in English language arts (ELA) by an amount equivalent to one to two months of instruction, increased the likelihood of being involved in a disciplinary incident by 15–20% (of the dependent variable mean) in middle and high school, and increased the likelihood of existing students leaving their schools before the start of the 2018–2019 school year by roughly 7% (with larger increases among white and African American students). Effects were mainly concentrated among higher-performing students, especially in disadvantaged school settings.

29. Historically, there is strong agreement that in these circumstances, having access to education (versus not having access) leads “to a range of positive outcomes including child protection and well-being, economic development, peace building, and reconstruction” (Burde et al. 2017).

30. Other contingency planning strategies involve providing psychosocial programs or supplemental educational activities that protect children from harm. The strategies avoid unstructured days where traumatizing memories linger, fears thrive, and violence is always possible (Sommers 1999). Some education content, for example in refugee contexts, may be designed to mitigate conflict, and peace education programs show promise in changing attitudes and behaviors toward members of those perceived as the “other” (Burde et al. 2017). As Anderson (2020) indicates, “it is not only the mechanism and approach that is used but also the quality and methods of teaching that are critical to understand.” Different mechanisms for delivering education include radio, podcast, or television broadcasts; online programs or virtual peer learning circles; and even the provision of kits with basic materials (pencils, exercise books, erasers, etc.). Another critical element is to ensure that children have access to the instructional mechanisms used.

31. A recent publication by The Century Foundation notes “the significant variation in both per-pupil spending and student outcomes across the country” and estimates that the U.S. needs to spend an additional $150 billion to ensure that all students “achieve national average outcomes” (TCF 2020). For research about the important role that opportunity gaps and family income play in education performance, see Coleman et al. 1966; Reardon 2011; García and Weiss 2017; Putnam 2015; Rothstein 2004; and Weiss and Reville 2019.

32. Food insecurity is a different measure than poverty. The former, in the Bauer article, refers to the share of households reporting to the U.S. Census Bureau that it was sometimes or often the case that the children in the household “were not eating enough because we just couldn’t afford enough food.” But poverty rates are also an instructive measure during this crisis. Using an unlikely scenario of an unemployment rate of 30% this year due to COVD-19, Parolin and Wimer (2020) estimate that poverty rates in the United States could reach their highest levels in 50 years. Specifically, they estimate that if unemployment rates stay at 30% throughout the year, the supplemental poverty measure (SPM) rate for children would rise by more than 7 percentage points, from 13.6% to 20.9% (the SPM created by the U.S. Census Bureau is a measure of poverty that some researchers consider more accurate than the official poverty measure because it takes into account income from such benefits as food stamps and housing assistance).

33. A total of 1.5 million students surveyed in the 2017–2018 school year had experienced homelessness at some point during the last three school years (USICH 2020).

34. Even if they don’t lose their jobs, some workers and virtually all essential workers don’t have access to work remotely (following the traditional racial/SES inequities). The inability to work remotely means that keeping their jobs and thus their access to health insurance disproportionately exposes them to the virus (Gould and Shierholz 2020; Bivens and Zipperer 2020) and makes it nearly impossible for them to supervise their children and assist them in their education needs.

35. For updated information, nationally and for various subgroups, see the CDC COVID Data Tracker (CDC 2020c).

36. This is a problem both for students in dense urban areas, where normally strong hospital systems have been overwhelmed at times during the pandemic, and in rural areas, where already gutted systems have lacked the capacity to deal with the onslaught of cases. See, for example, the description of New York City’s hospitals when that city was hit hard early in the pandemic in Arnold 2020 as well as Sandoval 2020’s more recent account of a small rural hospital on the Texas–Mexico border.

37. Specifically, in our studies, poor students are students eligible for the federal free or reduced-price lunch programs under federal guidelines that deliver such meals based on family income falling below a certain threshold. Non-poor students are students who are ineligible for those programs. For a recent discussion, see Cookson 2020.

38. While 25% of superintendents reported that almost all of their students (91–100%) had internet access at home and 26% reported that almost all of their students had devices to connect to the internet at home, substantial shares of superintendents reported gaps in that access: 23% estimated that just 81–90% had access to internet and devices; 16–17% estimated that 71–80% had access to internet and devices; 11% estimated that just 61–70% had access to internet and devices; 10% said the share with access to internet and devices was 50% or less; and 14% said the share with access to internet and devices was 50% or less (Rogers and Ellerson Ng 2020).

39. As early as March, Texas waived requirements that students take its standardized state STAAR test due to the closure of schools (Swaby 2020), and Massachusetts did the same in April (Lisinski 2020). See also Brookings Institution 2020; Darling-Hammond and Kini 2020; NEPC 2020; Ravitch 2020.

40. AFT 2020d. Capstone projects are end-of-year term projects that students can complete to bring the school year to a close in lieu of statewide standardized assessments (see Weingarten 2020). For some examples of these projects, see Dickinson 2020.

41. U.S. Census Bureau (2020b). McNichol and Leachman (2020) estimate “$555 billion in shortfalls over state fiscal years 2020–2022.” Bivens (2020) reviews estimates of a revenue shortfall for state and local governments of nearly $1 trillion.

42. See Baker and DiCarlo 2020; Leachman and Figueroa 2019; Partelow, Yin, and Sargrad 2020.

43. Since March 2020, the House of Representatives and the Senate have passed four coronavirus relief packages totaling over $3 trillion. The most current proposed measures are the HEROES and HEALS Acts (Lee 2020a, b; Progressive Caucus Action Fund 2020). For a discussion on the relatively small amounts that public schools and education have received, see Jordan 2020b; Reber and Gordon 2020. See also Snell 2020.

44. An obvious lesson learned from the COVID-19 crisis is that schools and related sectors like early childhood education and child care are undervalued relative to their key contributions to the societal good. Schools are “essential to the operation of the country… It is impossible to restart the economy without the schools, they go together” and are “a critical part of the social safety net for children” (ASI 2020). Education and also health and social services are “forms of investment, not consumption; necessities, not luxuries” (Folbre 2016). Just as we have learned that many formerly invisible workers are “essential” to the daily functioning of our economy, we must treat education as the essential service it is and support it as such.

45. Blad 2020; Broadwater 2020; Calargo 2020; Ferris 2020; Ferguson 2020; Strauss 2020; Valant 2020.

46. See Tinubu Ali and Herrera 2020; Cohodes 2020.

47. One potential silver lining of the coronavirus pandemic is that it brings attention to a longstanding issue in education: the inadequate systems of professional development for teachers (see García and Weiss 2019). As practitioners, researchers, and policymakers collaborate more closely on professional development offerings that will help teachers teach during the pandemic, that model can inform a broader look at the systems of professional supports available to teachers and prompt more research on what constitutes optimal professional development—i.e., what professional development offerings need to cover, how the offerings should be delivered and where and for how long, and how teachers are connected to the opportunities. As we showed in García and Weiss 2019, teachers want these supports but too often are offered one-size-fits-all programs when there is no single optimal combination valid for all teachers at all times and in all settings. Also shown in García and Weiss 2019, enhanced professional development would play a role in keeping teachers in the classroom and attracting new professionals into teaching.

48. See for example U.S. Senate 2020 for an overview of the proposed Coronavirus Child Care and Education Relief Act.

49. See CDC 2020a, 2020b; AASA 2020; UNESCO et al. 2020; NEA 2020; AFT 2020a; National Superintendents Roundtable 2020. There are still many things that scientists and public health experts do not know about the prevalence, transmission, and long-term consequences of contracting COVID-19 among children and adolescents. Likewise, there is no universally agreed on threshold of incidence of the disease under which activities can safely resume. While these questions are beyond the scope of this report and our areas of expertise, they are critical factors weighing on the reopening of our schools. Several studies point to lower prevalence of infection among children than on average but also to the need to assess whether the incidence of the disease among children can be influenced by selective testing, how prevalence of the virus among children compares with prevalence among their parents (i.e., whether the rate of infection of parents is different from their children’s), how these have changed over time (i.e., whether the immunity lasts longer for children or for parents, etc.), etc. (Idele et al. 2020; Pollán et al. 2020; Heald-Sargent et al. 2020). The American Academy of Pediatrics (2020) is requesting that schools reopen. See Goldstein 2020b.

50. While there is no precise estimate of how much following these guidelines would cost, the School Superintendents Association estimates that the average school district will need an additional $1.78 million to meet the COVID-19-related expenses of reopening schools (AASA 2020). The National Academy of Sciences estimates the cost of health-related supplies at $1.8 million for a school district serving 3,200 students (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2020). The Council of Chief State School Officers explains that the costs associated with opening schools safely under appropriate health and safety protocols would add up to about $30 billion across all schools (CCSSO 2020). The American Federation of Teachers culls from a number of sources to estimate that a total of $116.5 billion is needed for all measures, $35 billion of which would be needed for additional instructional staff to support adequate social distancing (AFT 2020b, 2020c). See also DiNapoli Jr. 2020 and Berman 2020. The cost of reopening schools is an unsettled issue.

51. See ASI 2020; CPCC, The Education Trust, NEA 2020; Duflo 2020; Brookings Institution 2020.

52. See Gordon 2013; RESEARCHED 2020.

53. AFT 2020d; Weingarten 2020; Dickinson 2020.

54. See García and Weiss 2020; Will 2020; Page 2020; Hamilton, Kaufman, and Diliberti 2020; NIRS 2020. For early retirements of teachers and principals, see Will 2020 and Page 2020. For challenges imposed by remote instruction, see Greif Green and Bettini 2020; Prothero 2020. In terms of recessions, public education job losses following the Great Recession exceeded 316,000 between September 2008 and September 2011 (BLS 2020). The job losses in April 2020 alone were already greater than in all of the Great Recession: 468,800 jobs were lost just a month after the pandemic started (Gould 2020b; see BLS 2020 for a still deeper decrease in May and a slight recovery in June and July). An estimate of the consequences of a 15% reduction in state education funding says that it could lead to the loss of more than 300,000 teaching positions (or 8.4%; see Griffith 2020).

55. See Darling-Hammond et al. 2020; Shonkoff and Phillips 2000; García and Weiss 2016; Walker, Tim 2020; Weiss and Reville 2019; Zhao 2020; Clark et al. 2020; Goldstein 2020a.

56. See Mishel and Rothstein 2003 and Schanzenbach 2020 for a recent review of the influence of class size on achievement. Note that this literature was not reviewed in the literature review section of this report because class size has generally not been a feature of the pandemic. However, in the literature, smaller classes are an implicit recommendation from various subfields. For evidence on summer programs, see McCombs et al. 2019. For evidence on tutoring effectiveness, see Nickow, Oreopoulos, and Quan 2020. On personalized learning, see Kim 2019.

57. Ferguson et al. 2020; García 2020; Hamilton, Kaufman, and Diliberti 2020.

58. Oakes, Maier, and Daniel 2017; Gonzalez 2018; Weiss and Reville 2019; Darling-Hammond et al. 2020; Starr 2020.

59. Darling-Hammond et al. (2020) discuss this framework as informed by evidence from the science of learning and development. See the different principles of practice in their Figure 1.

60. Weiss and Reville 2019; Shonkoff and Williams 2020.

61. EPI’s series of reports on the teacher shortage documents the factors that lead teachers to quit (and likely discourage people from entering the profession). See Economic Policy Institute 2020. See Allegretto and Mishel 2019 for estimates of the teacher pay penalty (how much less teachers earn in wages and benefits than comparable college-educated workers in other professions).

62. See García 2015 and García and Weiss 2017, among others.

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Covid-19’s Impact on Students’ Academic and Mental Well-Being

The pandemic has revealed—and exacerbated—inequities that hold many students back. Here’s how teachers can help.

The pandemic has shone a spotlight on inequality in America: School closures and social isolation have affected all students, but particularly those living in poverty. Adding to the damage to their learning, a mental health crisis is emerging as many students have lost access to services that were offered by schools.

No matter what form school takes when the new year begins—whether students and teachers are back in the school building together or still at home—teachers will face a pressing issue: How can they help students recover and stay on track throughout the year even as their lives are likely to continue to be disrupted by the pandemic?

New research provides insights about the scope of the problem—as well as potential solutions.

The Achievement Gap Is Likely to Widen

A new study suggests that the coronavirus will undo months of academic gains, leaving many students behind. The study authors project that students will start the new school year with an average of 66 percent of the learning gains in reading and 44 percent of the learning gains in math, relative to the gains for a typical school year. But the situation is worse on the reading front, as the researchers also predict that the top third of students will make gains, possibly because they’re likely to continue reading with their families while schools are closed, thus widening the achievement gap.

To make matters worse, “few school systems provide plans to support students who need accommodations or other special populations,” the researchers point out in the study, potentially impacting students with special needs and English language learners.

Of course, the idea that over the summer students forget some of what they learned in school isn’t new. But there’s a big difference between summer learning loss and pandemic-related learning loss: During the summer, formal schooling stops, and learning loss happens at roughly the same rate for all students, the researchers point out. But instruction has been uneven during the pandemic, as some students have been able to participate fully in online learning while others have faced obstacles—such as lack of internet access—that have hindered their progress.

In the study, researchers analyzed a national sample of 5 million students in grades 3–8 who took the MAP Growth test, a tool schools use to assess students’ reading and math growth throughout the school year. The researchers compared typical growth in a standard-length school year to projections based on students being out of school from mid-March on. To make those projections, they looked at research on the summer slide, weather- and disaster-related closures (such as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina), and absenteeism.

The researchers predict that, on average, students will experience substantial drops in reading and math, losing roughly three months’ worth of gains in reading and five months’ worth of gains in math. For Megan Kuhfeld, the lead author of the study, the biggest takeaway isn’t that learning loss will happen—that’s a given by this point—but that students will come back to school having declined at vastly different rates.

“We might be facing unprecedented levels of variability come fall,” Kuhfeld told me. “Especially in school districts that serve families with lots of different needs and resources. Instead of having students reading at a grade level above or below in their classroom, teachers might have kids who slipped back a lot versus kids who have moved forward.” 

Disproportionate Impact on Students Living in Poverty and Students of Color

Horace Mann once referred to schools as the “great equalizers,” yet the pandemic threatens to expose the underlying inequities of remote learning. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center analysis , 17 percent of teenagers have difficulty completing homework assignments because they do not have reliable access to a computer or internet connection. For Black students, the number spikes to 25 percent.

“There are many reasons to believe the Covid-19 impacts might be larger for children in poverty and children of color,” Kuhfeld wrote in the study. Their families suffer higher rates of infection, and the economic burden disproportionately falls on Black and Hispanic parents, who are less likely to be able to work from home during the pandemic.

Although children are less likely to become infected with Covid-19, the adult mortality rates, coupled with the devastating economic consequences of the pandemic, will likely have an indelible impact on their well-being.

Impacts on Students’ Mental Health

That impact on well-being may be magnified by another effect of school closures: Schools are “the de facto mental health system for many children and adolescents,” providing mental health services to 57 percent of adolescents who need care, according to the authors of a recent study published in JAMA Pediatrics . School closures may be especially disruptive for children from lower-income families, who are disproportionately likely to receive mental health services exclusively from schools.

“The Covid-19 pandemic may worsen existing mental health problems and lead to more cases among children and adolescents because of the unique combination of the public health crisis, social isolation, and economic recession,” write the authors of that study.

A major concern the researchers point to: Since most mental health disorders begin in childhood, it is essential that any mental health issues be identified early and treated. Left untreated, they can lead to serious health and emotional problems. In the short term, video conferencing may be an effective way to deliver mental health services to children.

Mental health and academic achievement are linked, research shows. Chronic stress changes the chemical and physical structure of the brain, impairing cognitive skills like attention, concentration, memory, and creativity. “You see deficits in your ability to regulate emotions in adaptive ways as a result of stress,” said Cara Wellman, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Indiana University in a 2014 interview . In her research, Wellman discovered that chronic stress causes the connections between brain cells to shrink in mice, leading to cognitive deficiencies in the prefrontal cortex. 

While trauma-informed practices were widely used before the pandemic, they’re likely to be even more integral as students experience economic hardships and grieve the loss of family and friends. Teachers can look to schools like Fall-Hamilton Elementary in Nashville, Tennessee, as a model for trauma-informed practices . 

3 Ways Teachers Can Prepare

When schools reopen, many students may be behind, compared to a typical school year, so teachers will need to be very methodical about checking in on their students—not just academically but also emotionally. Some may feel prepared to tackle the new school year head-on, but others will still be recovering from the pandemic and may still be reeling from trauma, grief, and anxiety. 

Here are a few strategies teachers can prioritize when the new school year begins:

• Focus on relationships first. Fear and anxiety about the pandemic—coupled with uncertainty about the future—can be disruptive to a student’s ability to come to school ready to learn. Teachers can act as a powerful buffer against the adverse effects of trauma by helping to establish a safe and supportive environment for learning. From morning meetings to regular check-ins with students, strategies that center around relationship-building will be needed in the fall.
• Strengthen diagnostic testing. Educators should prepare for a greater range of variability in student learning than they would expect in a typical school year. Low-stakes assessments such as exit tickets and quizzes can help teachers gauge how much extra support students will need, how much time should be spent reviewing last year’s material, and what new topics can be covered.
• Differentiate instruction—particularly for vulnerable students. For the vast majority of schools, the abrupt transition to online learning left little time to plan a strategy that could adequately meet every student’s needs—in a recent survey by the Education Trust, only 24 percent of parents said that their child’s school was providing materials and other resources to support students with disabilities, and a quarter of non-English-speaking students were unable to obtain materials in their own language. Teachers can work to ensure that the students on the margins get the support they need by taking stock of students’ knowledge and skills, and differentiating instruction by giving them choices, connecting the curriculum to their interests, and providing them multiple opportunities to demonstrate their learning.

• Open access
• Published: 13 December 2023

Association between COVID-19 and outstanding academic performance at a Spanish university

• Fares Amer 1 ,
• Tamara López 7 ,
• Mario Gil-Conesa 1 ,
• Silvia Carlos 1 , 2 ,
• Arturo H Ariño 3 , 4 ,
• Francisco Carmona-Torre 2 , 8 , 9 ,
• Miguel A. Martínez-González 1 , 2 , 5 , 6 &
• Alejandro Fernandez-Montero 2 , 7  

Archives of Public Health volume  81 , Article number:  213 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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SARS-CoV-2 is the causative agent of COVID-19 identified in December 2019, an acute infectious respiratory disease that can cause persistent neurological and musculoskeletal symptoms such as headache, fatigue, myalgias difficulty concentrating, among others including acute cerebrovascular disease with a prevalence of 1–35%. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 in undergraduate students on their academic performance as an indicator of their intellectual ability and performance in a university that maintained 100% face-to-face teaching during the 2020–2021 academic year.

A total of 7,039 undergraduate students were analyzed in a prospective cohort study at the University of Navarra. A questionnaire including sociodemographic and behavioral questions was sent. PCRs were performed throughout the academic year for the diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection and students’ academic results were provided by the academic center, adjusted descriptive and multivariate models were performed to assess the association.

A total of 658 (9.3%) participants were diagnosed with COVID-19, almost 4.0% of them achieved outstanding academic results, while uninfected students did so in 7.3%. SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a significant decrease in having outstanding academic results (OR = 0.57; 95% CI: 0.38–0.86).

Having COVID-19 disease, decreased academic performance in undergraduate students. Therefore, it is necessary to prevent infection even in the youngest sections of the population.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

SARS-CoV-2 is the causing agent of COVID-19, an acute respiratory disease that causes a variety of symptoms such as fever, headache, cough, pneumonia, breathing difficulty, lung infection, anosmia or body pain [ 1 , 2 ]. The persistence of some of these symptoms and long-term effects of the disease more than 6 months after surviving to the infection have been described in many articles: severe fatigue (16-69.6%) [ 2 , 3 , 4 ], disabling or persisting headache (8–15%) [ 1 , 2 , 5 , 6 ], body pain described as myalgia, arthralgia or chest pain (2.4–6.3%) [ 2 ]. Moreover, even though the causing agent of COVID-19 is a respiratory virus, an increased risk of having neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases and effects have been described after survival [ 7 , 8 , 9 ], including increased incidence of a first psychiatric diagnosis in the following 14 to 90 days [ 10 ], PTSD, depression, OCD and panic disorder [ 11 ], difficulty in concentrating (5.9–13%) and memory loss (5.6–13%) [ 2 , 12 ] and insomnia [ 2 , 13 ]. These persistent symptoms of COVID-19 have been referred to as “Long COVID” [ 2 , 14 ].

The university period of any student is highly demanding in terms of mental and academic effort, pressure and work. During this period, students need to have good health in order to perform according to their aims and succeed to have access to a promising future. Understandably, any factor that might affect students’ health will impact directly on their academic performance. Specifically, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a big challenge for students to overcome being directly exposed to SARS-CoV-2, where all this context has triggered great distress [ 15 , 16 ].

Many studies found associations between isolated long COVID symptoms in other diseases and decreased intellectual and work performance, such as headache [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ], fatigue [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ], sleep disorders or insomnia [ 25 , 26 ], and health problems in general [ 27 ].

The main objective of this research is to investigate the association of COVID-19 infection effects on students’ academic performance, specifically on the achievement of academic excellence.

Study design

Between August 24, 2020 and May 30, 2021 a cohort study with a 9-month follow-up was conducted among an undergraduate university population at the University of Navarra (Spain) including 8,514 students that were monitored for SARS-CoV-2 infection by PCR testing.

Participants

Participants were undergraduate students from the campuses of Pamplona and Gipuzkoa in the University of Navarra that completed the academic course. Those who completed the questionnaire and gave their consent in the first question were finally included in the study (7,327). Those participants who reported a diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection prior to the start of the course (before August 24, 2020) were excluded, as well as those who didn’t finish the academic year and those who were temporary exchange students or not undergraduate students were also excluded from the analysis (Fig.  1 ). During the academic year, those students who were diagnosed with COVID-19 15 days before the exams period until the end of the period were excluded also (56 participants).

Baseline questionnaire and variables

A questionnaire with general questions about COVID-19 symptoms was sent to all students of the university during August and September 2020. This questionnaire included questions on socio-demographics: type of residence during the academic year, number of people with whom they lived, whether or not they lived with children at home, country of origin, hours of daily socialization, living with pets and type of transportation (public transport, walking, car, etc.). They were asked about preventive measures such as handwashing with soap, use of alcohol-based solutions, social distance, gloves, and use of masks (FFP2/3, surgical or cloth mask). They were also asked about data on their weight and height and whether or not they were smokers and about comorbidities (diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic lung disease, impaired coagulation, hypertension, immunosuppression, chronic kidney disease, and chronic liver disease) and any treatment.

In addition to the self-reported variables, objective variables were also collected by the university medical team, such as PCR tests performed on campus, and we obtained from university records the living habitat of the students, country of origin and the academic grades of those who participated.

COVID-19 diagnosis

Diagnosis of COVID-19 was done with PCR testing following this strategy: (1) Mandatory PCR testing for all students and employees at the beginning of the academic year in August 2020 and after Christmas 2020, (2) PCR testing to symptomatic individuals and close contacts, (3) Weekly random sampling during 8 weeks during the months of October until December, excluding holidays. The back to in-person plan is explained in detail elsewhere [ 28 ]. More than 34,000 PCR tests were performed.

Outcome variable

The main outcome variable was obtaining excellent results, understanding excellence as grades above 9 in the university student population. The score at the University of Navarra is from 0 to 10, with 0 being the worst grade and 10 being the best possible grade. Grades from 9 to 10 are considered as an outstanding result. The other grades categories were “Not passed”, for grades between 0 and < 5, “Passed”, for grades between 5 and < 7, and “Good”, for grades between 7 and < 9. Grades information was provided by the University of Navarra’s central office, at the end of the academic course 2020–2021 after all midterm, final and make-up exams were concluded.

Statistical analysis

Baseline characteristics of participants are described with frequencies or means and standard deviations, for categorical and continuous variables, respectively. The non-COVID-19 group was considered the reference category. We compared the outstanding academic results using logistic regression models. Obtaining an outstanding result was considered as a dichotomous variable, so an adjusted logistic regression was carried out. Odds Ratios (OR) were estimated and 95% CI were calculated. We built a first model without any adjustment (crude), a second model adjusted for age and sex, and a third multivariable adjusted model considering potential confounders. Finally, stratified analyses and tests for interactions with sex, undergraduate studies, type of housing and origin were performed to ensure the robustness of the results in different scenarios.

Multivariable adjusted models were adjusted for: sex, age, type of housing, BMI, smoker, academic course, hours of socialization, university campus, pets during the academic year and region of origin. Although only 6 variables presented some missing value, the one with the highest number of missing values was hours of socialization with 17.4% of missings, followed by BMI, with 11.3%. A simple imputation was used on the variables when including them as adjustment variables in the multivariate regression.

All p values are two-tailed and a p < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Stata 12 was used to analyze the data.

This study followed the strengthening of the reporting of observational studies in epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guidelines for cohort studies. The study was conducted in compliance with the study protocol, the current version of the Declaration of Helsinki, and the local, legal and regulatory requirements (Approved by the University of Navarra Ethics committee: 2020.190 on October 30th, 2020).

Flowchart of the sample studied at the University of Navarra during the academic year 2020–2021

Out of 7,039 participants included in our study, all of them were undergraduate students from the campuses of Navarra and Gipuzkoa. A total of 9.3% participants were infected with SARS-CoV-2 during the course, from whom 58% were female, and the mean age was 21.0 SD: 3.21.

Some characteristics show significant differences between students who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 and those who weren’t, the greatest disparity is observed in the type of housing, region of origin, having pets and type of studies. The baseline characteristics of the study participants according to passing COVID-19 or not in students can be seen in Table  1 . It is observed that, with respect to the group of students that were not infected, in the infected students group they lived more (76%) at a university apartment or residence during the academic year, were Latin American (20.8%), and were studying humanities degrees (56.53%).

In terms of the mean of academic results and percentages of credits passed, there were significant differences between the two groups, where uninfected students obtained a mean grade of 7.24 (SD 1.36) vs. 7.12 (SD 1.27, p = 0.03) among infected students, and a mean of 93.5% (SD 1.6%) credits passed vs. 93.2% (SD 1–6%, p = 0.050) among infected students. Differences in academic performance classified by four strata are shown in Fig.  2 .

After performing the multi-adjusted analyses, it was observed that students with COVID-19 were 46% less likely to have outstanding academic performance with respect to those who didn’t have COVID-19 (Table  2 ).

In the stratified analyses, a significant inverse association was found between COVID-19 infection and outstanding academic results in females, humanities students, those living away from their family home, and non-national students (Fig.  3 ). In addition, a statistically significant multiplicative interaction was found for university undergraduate studies and origin with outstanding academic performance (p-interaction = 0.033 and 0.038), respectively.

Percentage differences in favor of having had COVID-19 disease

Odds Ratios of students that had COVID-19 relevant characteristics and outstanding academic results. Stratified analysis between students that had COVID-19 and outstanding academic. *Adjusted for sex, age, BMI, smoking status, type of housing, pets during the academic year, region of origin, university campus, year of study, daily hours of socialization

In this prospective cohort study, an association between infection by SARS-CoV-2 and the decrease in academic performance in having outstanding results was found.

This association can be explained by the set symptoms that persistent COVID-19 produces and that negatively impact academic performance. In this known set of several persistent symptoms, some of them lasted for more than 6 months [ 29 ]. Persistent fatigue is one of the main sequelae after having COVID-19, with a prevalence of 55% using the Fatigue Severity Scale [ 29 ], having a direct impact on physical [ 23 ], cognitive performance [ 24 ] and labor performance [ 22 ]. Headache has also been defined as a post-COVID-19 symptom with a prevalence of 44% [ 30 ]. In this sense, it is known that headaches can cause significant disabilities in adolescents and adults by affecting their lives, their academic performance and their relationships with others [ 20 ]. In addition, it is known that COVID-19 infection can produce severe impairment of GABA-ergic intracortical circuits in patients who recovered from COVID-19 with various central and peripheral neurological manifestations and who presented fatigue and impairment of executive functions, which causes a decrease in productivity and labor performance [ 18 , 19 ].

We have observed that two significant factors lower the probability of having outstanding academic results in those students who had COVID-19: studying a humanities degree, with a 67% less than studying sciences degree, and being Non-national students (mostly Latin American), with a 90% less than being Spanish. It is known that COVID-19 generates higher infection rates and causes more severe symptoms in Latin Americans and they present a higher vulnerability to the disease as well as a greater probability of suffering Long COVID effects, which could directly affect their academic and intellectual performance in achieving outstanding academic results.

This result could be explained by the fact that there is a higher proportion of Latin American students studying humanities degrees, 19.21% of the total students of humanities degrees, with regard to 6.82% of Latin American students of the total students studying science degrees. Comparably between both groups of students studying sciences and humanities degrees, there are almost three times as many Latin American students in the humanities degrees group, and as other studies observed, there is a significant difference in how COVID-19 affects Latin American people, being an ethnic group that presented higher positive testing, infection rates and cumulative incidence of the disease [ 31 , 32 , 33 ].

The present study has some limitations. First, in this study we did not measure symptoms to verify our hypothesis and, despite this, we have found significant results. According to this hypothesis, if we had measured symptoms and divided our population into three different groups (with persistent COVID, without persistent COVID and uninfected), we could have found results with a greater difference between the magnitudes. A second limitation is that the academic results used are the result of midterm, final, and make-up exams, with some students having passed covid after an evaluation test.

The strengths of the present study include the analysis of almost the entire population of students. In addition, both independent and outcome variables are not self-reported and are measured objectively. In addition, after sensitivity analyses the consistency of the results was maintained.

COVID-19 in the young population is a mild disease without major consequences and death, but still, it may cause long COVID effects that may negatively affect their daily life and academic performance. So, regardless of the fact that they may put other more vulnerable groups at risk, it is interesting to prevent COVID-19 infections in this population group as well.

In conclusion, COVID-19 in university students is significantly related to not having outstanding results. Future studies should be performed taking into account post-COVID-19 symptoms to confirm our results.

Data availability

Data can be requested from Alejandro Fernandez-Montero by e-mail [email protected].

Abbreviations

Body mass index

Cumulative incidence

Coronavirus disease 2019

Filtering Face Piece 2/3

Gamma-aminobutyric acid

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2

Obsessive compulsive disorder

Polymerase chain reaction

Post-traumatic stress disorder

Strengthening the reporting of observational studies in epidemiology

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This work was supported by the Navarra Government (number 0011-3638-2020-000013).

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Fares Amer, Mario Gil-Conesa, Silvia Carlos & Miguel A. Martínez-González

Navarra Institute for Health Research (IdiSNA), Pamplona, Navarra, Spain

Silvia Carlos, Francisco Carmona-Torre, Miguel A. Martínez-González & Alejandro Fernandez-Montero

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Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H Chan School, Boston, MA, USA

Department of Occupational Medicine, University of Navarra Clinic, Av. Pio XII, 36. 31008, Pamplona, Navarra, Spain

Tamara López & Alejandro Fernandez-Montero

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A. Fernandez-Montero conceptualized the study. M. Gil-Conesa, F. Amer, F. Carmona-Torre and A. Fernandez-Montero curated data. M. Gil-Conesa, F. Amer, T. Lopez and A. Fernandez-Montero conducted the formal analysis. A. Fernandez-Montero, M.A. Martinez-Gonzalez, and F. Amer conducted the investigation. A. Fernandez-Montero, M.A. Martinez-Gonzalez, F. Amer, and S. Carlos performed the methodology. A. Fernandez-Montero, S. Carlos, and M. A. Martinez-Gonzalez supervised the study. F. Amer, T. Lopez, M. Gil-Conesa, S. Carlos, and A. Fernandez-Montero wrote the original draft. F. Amer, M. Gil-Conesa, S. Carlos, A.H. Ariño, M.A.Martinez-Gonzalez, and A. Fernandez-Montero reviewed and edited the writing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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The study was conducted in compliance with the study protocol, the current version of the Declaration of Helsinki, and the local, legal and regulatory requirements (Approved by the University of Navarra Ethics committee: 2020.190 on October 30th, 2020).

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Participants were undergraduate students from the campuses of Pamplona and Gipuzkoa in the University of Navarra that completed the academic course. They were all sent a questionnaire at the beginning of the academic course and were asked for their consent to be included in the study.

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Amer, F., López, T., Gil-Conesa, M. et al. Association between COVID-19 and outstanding academic performance at a Spanish university. Arch Public Health 81 , 213 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13690-023-01225-w

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The Effect of COVID-19 on Education

Jacob hoofman.

a Wayne State University School of Medicine, 540 East Canfield, Detroit, MI 48201, USA

Elizabeth Secord

b Department of Pediatrics, Wayne Pediatrics, School of Medicine, Pediatrics Wayne State University, 400 Mack Avenue, Detroit, MI 48201, USA

COVID-19 has changed education for learners of all ages. Preliminary data project educational losses at many levels and verify the increased anxiety and depression associated with the changes, but there are not yet data on long-term outcomes. Guidance from oversight organizations regarding the safety and efficacy of new delivery modalities for education have been quickly forged. It is no surprise that the socioeconomic gaps and gaps for special learners have widened. The medical profession and other professions that teach by incrementally graduated internships are also severely affected and have had to make drastic changes.

• • Virtual learning has become a norm during COVID-19.
• • Children requiring special learning services, those living in poverty, and those speaking English as a second language have lost more from the pandemic educational changes.
• • For children with attention deficit disorder and no comorbidities, virtual learning has sometimes been advantageous.
• • Math learning scores are more likely to be affected than language arts scores by pandemic changes.
• • School meals, access to friends, and organized activities have also been lost with the closing of in-person school.

The transition to an online education during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may bring about adverse educational changes and adverse health consequences for children and young adult learners in grade school, middle school, high school, college, and professional schools. The effects may differ by age, maturity, and socioeconomic class. At this time, we have few data on outcomes, but many oversight organizations have tried to establish guidelines, expressed concerns, and extrapolated from previous experiences.

General educational losses and disparities

Many researchers are examining how the new environment affects learners’ mental, physical, and social health to help compensate for any losses incurred by this pandemic and to better prepare for future pandemics. There is a paucity of data at this juncture, but some investigators have extrapolated from earlier school shutdowns owing to hurricanes and other natural disasters. 1

Inclement weather closures are estimated in some studies to lower middle school math grades by 0.013 to 0.039 standard deviations and natural disaster closures by up to 0.10 standard deviation decreases in overall achievement scores. 2 The data from inclement weather closures did show a more significant decrease for children dependent on school meals, but generally the data were not stratified by socioeconomic differences. 3 , 4 Math scores are impacted overall more negatively by school absences than English language scores for all school closures. 4 , 5

The Northwest Evaluation Association is a global nonprofit organization that provides research-based assessments and professional development for educators. A team of researchers at Stanford University evaluated Northwest Evaluation Association test scores for students in 17 states and the District of Columbia in the Fall of 2020 and estimated that the average student had lost one-third of a year to a full year's worth of learning in reading, and about three-quarters of a year to more than 1 year in math since schools closed in March 2020. 5

With school shifted from traditional attendance at a school building to attendance via the Internet, families have come under new stressors. It is increasingly clear that families depended on schools for much more than math and reading. Shelter, food, health care, and social well-being are all part of what children and adolescents, as well as their parents or guardians, depend on schools to provide. 5 , 6

Many families have been impacted negatively by the loss of wages, leading to food insecurity and housing insecurity; some of loss this is a consequence of the need for parents to be at home with young children who cannot attend in-person school. 6 There is evidence that this economic instability is leading to an increase in depression and anxiety. 7 In 1 survey, 34.71% of parents reported behavioral problems in their children that they attributed to the pandemic and virtual schooling. 8

Children have been infected with and affected by coronavirus. In the United States, 93,605 students tested positive for COVID-19, and it was reported that 42% were Hispanic/Latino, 32% were non-Hispanic White, and 17% were non-Hispanic Black, emphasizing a disproportionate effect for children of color. 9 COVID infection itself is not the only issue that affects children’s health during the pandemic. School-based health care and school-based meals are lost when school goes virtual and children of lower socioeconomic class are more severely affected by these losses. Although some districts were able to deliver school meals, school-based health care is a primary source of health care for many children and has left some chronic conditions unchecked during the pandemic. 10

Many families report that the stress of the pandemic has led to a poorer diet in children with an increase in the consumption of sweet and fried foods. 11 , 12 Shelter at home orders and online education have led to fewer exercise opportunities. Research carried out by Ammar and colleagues 12 found that daily sitting had increased from 5 to 8 hours a day and binge eating, snacking, and the number of meals were all significantly increased owing to lockdown conditions and stay-at-home initiatives. There is growing evidence in both animal and human models that diets high in sugar and fat can play a detrimental role in cognition and should be of increased concern in light of the pandemic. 13

The family stress elicited by the COVID-19 shutdown is a particular concern because of compiled evidence that adverse life experiences at an early age are associated with an increased likelihood of mental health issues as an adult. 14 There is early evidence that children ages 6 to 18 years of age experienced a significant increase in their expression of “clinginess, irritability, and fear” during the early pandemic school shutdowns. 15 These emotions associated with anxiety may have a negative impact on the family unit, which was already stressed owing to the pandemic.

Another major concern is the length of isolation many children have had to endure since the pandemic began and what effects it might have on their ability to socialize. The school, for many children, is the agent for forming their social connections as well as where early social development occurs. 16 Noting that academic performance is also declining the pandemic may be creating a snowball effect, setting back children without access to resources from which they may never recover, even into adulthood.

Predictions from data analysis of school absenteeism, summer breaks, and natural disaster occurrences are imperfect for the current situation, but all indications are that we should not expect all children and adolescents to be affected equally. 4 , 5 Although some children and adolescents will likely suffer no long-term consequences, COVID-19 is expected to widen the already existing educational gap from socioeconomic differences, and children with learning differences are expected to suffer more losses than neurotypical children. 4 , 5

Special education and the COVID-19 pandemic

Although COVID-19 has affected all levels of education reception and delivery, children with special needs have been more profoundly impacted. Children in the United States who have special needs have legal protection for appropriate education by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. 17 , 18 Collectively, this legislation is meant to allow for appropriate accommodations, services, modifications, and specialized academic instruction to ensure that “every child receives a free appropriate public education . . . in the least restrictive environment.” 17

Children with autism usually have applied behavioral analysis (ABA) as part of their individualized educational plan. ABA therapists for autism use a technique of discrete trial training that shapes and rewards incremental changes toward new behaviors. 19 Discrete trial training involves breaking behaviors into small steps and repetition of rewards for small advances in the steps toward those behaviors. It is an intensive one-on-one therapy that puts a child and therapist in close contact for many hours at a time, often 20 to 40 hours a week. This therapy works best when initiated at a young age in children with autism and is often initiated in the home. 19

Because ABA workers were considered essential workers from the early days of the pandemic, organizations providing this service had the responsibility and the freedom to develop safety protocols for delivery of this necessary service and did so in conjunction with certifying boards. 20

Early in the pandemic, there were interruptions in ABA followed by virtual visits, and finally by in-home therapy with COVID-19 isolation precautions. 21 Although the efficacy of virtual visits for ABA therapy would empirically seem to be inferior, there are few outcomes data available. The balance of safety versus efficacy quite early turned to in-home services with interruptions owing to illness and decreased therapist availability owing to the pandemic. 21 An overarching concern for children with autism is the possible loss of a window of opportunity to intervene early. Families of children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder report increased stress compared with families of children with other disabilities before the pandemic, and during the pandemic this burden has increased with the added responsibility of monitoring in-home schooling. 20

Early data on virtual schooling children with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit with hyperactivity (ADHD) shows that adolescents with ADD/ADHD found the switch to virtual learning more anxiety producing and more challenging than their peers. 22 However, according to a study in Ireland, younger children with ADD/ADHD and no other neurologic or psychiatric diagnoses who were stable on medication tended to report less anxiety with at-home schooling and their parents and caregivers reported improved behavior during the pandemic. 23 An unexpected benefit of shelter in home versus shelter in place may be to identify these stressors in face-to-face school for children with ADD/ADHD. If children with ADD/ADHD had an additional diagnosis of autism or depression, they reported increased anxiety with the school shutdown. 23 , 24

Much of the available literature is anticipatory guidance for in-home schooling of children with disabilities rather than data about schooling during the pandemic. The American Academy of Pediatrics published guidance advising that, because 70% of students with ADHD have other conditions, such as learning differences, oppositional defiant disorder, or depression, they may have very different responses to in home schooling which are a result of the non-ADHD diagnosis, for example, refusal to attempt work for children with oppositional defiant disorder, severe anxiety for those with depression and or anxiety disorders, and anxiety and perseveration for children with autism. 25 Children and families already stressed with learning differences have had substantial challenges during the COVID-19 school closures.

High school, depression, and COVID-19

High schoolers have lost a great deal during this pandemic. What should have been a time of establishing more independence has been hampered by shelter-in-place recommendations. Graduations, proms, athletic events, college visits, and many other social and educational events have been altered or lost and cannot be recaptured.

Adolescents reported higher rates of depression and anxiety associated with the pandemic, and in 1 study 14.4% of teenagers report post-traumatic stress disorder, whereas 40.4% report having depression and anxiety. 26 In another survey adolescent boys reported a significant decrease in life satisfaction from 92% before COVID to 72% during lockdown conditions. For adolescent girls, the decrease in life satisfaction was from 81% before COVID to 62% during the pandemic, with the oldest teenage girls reporting the lowest life satisfaction values during COVID-19 restrictions. 27 During the school shutdown for COVID-19, 21% of boys and 27% of girls reported an increase in family arguments. 26 Combine all of these reports with decreasing access to mental health services owing to pandemic restrictions and it becomes a complicated matter for parents to address their children's mental health needs as well as their educational needs. 28

A study conducted in Norway measured aspects of socialization and mood changes in adolescents during the pandemic. The opportunity for prosocial action was rated on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 6 (very much) based on how well certain phrases applied to them, for example, “I comforted a friend yesterday,” “Yesterday I did my best to care for a friend,” and “Yesterday I sent a message to a friend.” They also ranked mood by rating items on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 5 (very well) as items reflected their mood. 29 They found that adolescents showed an overall decrease in empathic concern and opportunity for prosocial actions, as well as a decrease in mood ratings during the pandemic. 29

A survey of 24,155 residents of Michigan projected an escalation of suicide risk for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender youth as well as those youth questioning their sexual orientation (LGBTQ) associated with increased social isolation. There was also a 66% increase in domestic violence for LGBTQ youth during shelter in place. 30 LGBTQ youth are yet another example of those already at increased risk having disproportionate effects of the pandemic.

Increased social media use during COVID-19, along with traditional forms of education moving to digital platforms, has led to the majority of adolescents spending significantly more time in front of screens. Excessive screen time is well-known to be associated with poor sleep, sedentary habits, mental health problems, and physical health issues. 31 With decreased access to physical activity, especially in crowded inner-city areas, and increased dependence on screen time for schooling, it is more difficult to craft easy solutions to the screen time issue.

During these times, it is more important than ever for pediatricians to check in on the mental health of patients with queries about how school is going, how patients are keeping contact with peers, and how are they processing social issues related to violence. Queries to families about the need for assistance with food insecurity, housing insecurity, and access to mental health services are necessary during this time of public emergency.

Medical school and COVID-19

Although medical school is an adult schooling experience, it affects not only the medical profession and our junior colleagues, but, by extrapolation, all education that requires hands-on experience or interning, and has been included for those reasons.

In the new COVID-19 era, medical schools have been forced to make drastic and quick changes to multiple levels of their curriculum to ensure both student and patient safety during the pandemic. Students entering their clinical rotations have had the most drastic alteration to their experience.

COVID-19 has led to some of the same changes high schools and colleges have adopted, specifically, replacement of large in-person lectures with small group activities small group discussion and virtual lectures. 32 The transition to an online format for medical education has been rapid and impacted both students and faculty. 33 , 34 In a survey by Singh and colleagues, 33 of the 192 students reporting 43.9% found online lectures to be poorer than physical classrooms during the pandemic. In another report by Shahrvini and colleagues, 35 of 104 students surveyed, 74.5% students felt disconnected from their medical school and their peers and 43.3% felt that they were unprepared for their clerkships. Although there are no pre-COVID-19 data for comparison, it is expected that the COVID-19 changes will lead to increased insecurity and feelings of poor preparation for clinical work.

Gross anatomy is a well-established tradition within the medical school curriculum and one that is conducted almost entirely in person and in close quarters around a cadaver. Harmon and colleagues 36 surveyed 67 gross anatomy educators and found that 8% were still holding in-person sessions and 34 ± 43% transitioned to using cadaver images and dissecting videos that could be accessed through the Internet.

Many third- and fourth-year medical students have seen periods of cancellation for clinical rotations and supplementation with online learning, telemedicine, or virtual rounds owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. 37 A study from Shahrvini and colleagues 38 found that an unofficial document from Reddit (a widely used social network platform with a subgroup for medical students and residents) reported that 75% of medical schools had canceled clinical activities for third- and fourth-year students for some part of 2020. In another survey by Harries and colleagues, 39 of the 741 students who responded, 93.7% were not involved in clinical rotations with in-person patient contact. The reactions of students varied, with 75.8% admitting to agreeing with the decision, 34.7% feeling guilty, and 27.0% feeling relieved. 39 In the same survey, 74.7% of students felt that their medical education had been disrupted, 84.1% said they felt increased anxiety, and 83.4% would accept the risk of COVID-19 infection if they were able to return to the clinical setting. 39

Since the start of the pandemic, medical schools have had to find new and innovative ways to continue teaching and exposing students to clinical settings. The use of electronic conferencing services has been critical to continuing education. One approach has been to turn to online applications like Google Hangouts, which come at no cost and offer a wide variety of tools to form an integrative learning environment. 32 , 37 , 40 Schools have also adopted a hybrid model of teaching where lectures can be prerecorded then viewed by the student asynchronously on their own time followed by live virtual lectures where faculty can offer question-and-answer sessions related to the material. By offering this new format, students have been given more flexibility in terms of creating a schedule that suits their needs and may decrease stress. 37

Although these changes can be a hurdle to students and faculty, it might prove to be beneficial for the future of medical training in some ways. Telemedicine is a growing field, and the American Medical Association and other programs have endorsed its value. 41 Telemedicine visits can still be used to take a history, conduct a basic visual physical examination, and build rapport, as well as performing other aspects of the clinical examination during a pandemic, and will continue to be useful for patients unable to attend regular visits at remote locations. Learning effectively now how to communicate professionally and carry out telemedicine visits may better prepare students for a future where telemedicine is an expectation and allow students to learn the limitations as well as the advantages of this modality. 41

Pandemic changes have strongly impacted the process of college applications, medical school applications, and residency applications. 32 For US medical residencies, 72% of applicants will, if the pattern from 2016 to 2019 continues, move between states or countries. 42 This level of movement is increasingly dangerous given the spread of COVID-19 and the lack of currently accepted procedures to carry out such a mass migration safely. The same follows for medical schools and universities.

We need to accept and prepare for the fact that medial students as well as other learners who require in-person training may lack some skills when they enter their profession. These skills will have to be acquired during a later phase of training. We may have less skilled entry-level resident physicians and nurses in our hospitals and in other clinical professions as well.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected and will continue to affect the delivery of knowledge and skills at all levels of education. Although many children and adult learners will likely compensate for this interruption of traditional educational services and adapt to new modalities, some will struggle. The widening of the gap for those whose families cannot absorb the teaching and supervision of education required for in-home education because they lack the time and skills necessary are not addressed currently. The gap for those already at a disadvantage because of socioeconomic class, language, and special needs are most severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic school closures and will have the hardest time compensating. As pediatricians, it is critical that we continue to check in with our young patients about how they are coping and what assistance we can guide them toward in our communities.

Clinics care points

• • Learners and educators at all levels of education have been affected by COVID-19 restrictions with rapid adaptations to virtual learning platforms.
• • The impact of COVID-19 on learners is not evenly distributed and children of racial minorities, those who live in poverty, those requiring special education, and children who speak English as a second language are more negatively affected by the need for remote learning.
• • Math scores are more impacted than language arts scores by previous school closures and thus far by these shutdowns for COVID-19.
• • Anxiety and depression have increased in children and particularly in adolescents as a result of COVID-19 itself and as a consequence of school changes.
• • Pediatricians should regularly screen for unmet needs in their patients during the pandemic, such as food insecurity with the loss of school meals, an inability to adapt to remote learning and increased computer time, and heightened anxiety and depression as results of school changes.

The authors have nothing to disclose.