COVID, Unfinished Learning and Learning Loss: Meeting the Challenge

On 25 February 2020, less than a month after the first COVID-19 cases appeared in the United States, an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave parents a warning that read like a prophecy. “You should ask your children’s schools about their plans for school dismissals,” said Nancy Messonnier (opens in a new tab). “Ask about their plans for distance learning.”

By 11 March, school closures were already affecting more than a million students (opens in a new tab). By the 25th of that month, every public school in the country was closed. Distance learning arrived that spring to fill a gap, and it has stayed with us since. Wave after wave of COVID variants made the pre-existing teacher shortage (opens in a new tab) worse, and in many countries the return to classroom teaching was patchy and slow.

“You should ask your children’s schools about their plans for school dismissals. Ask about their plans for distance learning.”

Nancy Messonnier, director at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 25 February 2020

The COVID-19 years have created unprecedented challenges for educators. When schools closed, or moved online, many students suffered both socially and emotionally. But the greatest threat in the disruption the pandemic brought may have fallen on learning itself.

We can observe that crisis through two documented phenomena: unfinished learning and learning loss. Once the problem is understood, we can work towards solutions, and some of those are set out below.

The costs of unfinished learning and learning loss

Learning loss did not appear for the first time with COVID-19. It is associated with any prolonged interruption of the learning process, including the summer holidays. But pandemic school closures appear to have made the problem bigger. When students are kept away from the learning process, they can forget the skills and the concepts they need in order to keep making progress. That is what we mean by learning loss, and it leads to real deficits, which in turn affect student outcomes.

According to UNICEF, pandemic-related learning loss could now cost students around the world close to 17 trillion dollars (opens in a new tab) in lifetime earnings.

Then there is the threat of unfinished learning. The term refers to the concepts students have not fully taken in, but which they will need in their later learning. Education is not always linear, but it is undeniably cumulative. You have to understand arithmetic before learning algebra, which you need in order to understand calculus, which is required for advanced physics, and so on.

When a global pandemic interrupts a class, students do not learn what they need in order to progress, even though they move up anyway. That brings frustration, and frustration brings absence.

So does the pandemic itself, with children staying at home, their parents perhaps at work, and attending school remotely dependent on access to a stable internet connection, a luxury that between 10 and 16 million American students (opens in a new tab) did without before the response to COVID. As many as 4 million of those students gained internet access at home during the school closures, but the digital divide remains significant, limiting opportunity for families, and for low-income families in particular. Absence, whether chosen or not, is linked to the likelihood of eventually dropping out of school.

McKinsey estimates that up to 1.2 million primary and secondary students (opens in a new tab) are at greater risk of dropping out of school because of chronic pandemic-related absence.

Education clearly faces serious challenges. So what can we do to meet them?

How to address the lingering effects of COVID on education

We are still recovering from the changes a global pandemic brought about. Two years is not long to reform a country’s education system. Our teachers are still learning, and nobody has all the answers.

That said, here are some hopeful trends. They may give you a few ideas about how to help students recover from the unfinished learning that has already happened, and how to reduce the effects of learning loss.

1. There is a stronger commitment to inclusive education

Pandemic-related unfinished learning differs from one student to the next, and the same is true of learning loss. That is no surprise, since every student is a singular person, each with their own needs and strengths. So climbing out of the educational hole the pandemic has put us in will require, first of all, effective teaching for everyone. The theory of inclusive education can help with that.

Inclusive education offers equal access to students with disabilities. In truth, this approach now seeks to remove learning barriers for all students, but it began as a philosophy of accessibility, growing out of the practice known as integrated education. An integrated classroom includes students with and without disabilities, but generally with the expectation that everyone learns in the same way. Inclusive education keeps that diversity in the classroom, but it offers several ways to engage with the course material, working to meet the individual needs of each student.

Inclusive education: a simplified example

Imagine a class asked to read a few pages of a textbook at their desks. A student with a learning difficulty uses a reading ruler to focus on one sentence at a time. Another student reads with no help at all. A third reads a braille version of the textbook. A student learning Spanish as a second language wears headphones and listens to the words while following along on the page. It is the same text, but assistive technology makes it accessible to students with different needs. That is inclusive education.

With the recent shift towards distance learning, the tools that help deliver individualised learning have had to evolve. They have had to become fully digital. Which brings us to the question of digital inclusion, a general consequence of the inclusive education mandate, and a key tool in the effort to counter learning loss and unfinished learning through pandemic school closures.

2. Digital inclusion has received particular attention

The aim of digital inclusion is equal access to information shared through communication technology. We can no longer take classroom teaching for granted: a pandemic, or any other disruption, can catch us by surprise at any time and force us back into hybrid or fully remote learning. Now is the moment to make sure our online learning environments work for everyone.

What does digital inclusion look like in the context of distance learning?

Beyond the five elements of a digitally inclusive learning environment (internet access, connected devices, training, technical support, and accessible online applications and content), digital inclusion calls for a multimodal approach to teaching, which means presenting the course material in several different ways. The digital tools that make this possible include:

• Read-aloud tools, such as web readers. A web reader is a digital tool that reads written content out loud, widening educational access for students who are blind, who have visual impairments, learning difficulties or language fluency problems, low literacy, or simply the kind of mind that retains information better through the ears than through the eyes.
• Digital page masks. Many students find it hard to concentrate while reading, whether because of a different learning profile, an attention disorder or screen fatigue. A digital page mask is a tool that shades the part of the screen outside an adjustable area, in order to remove distractions.

• Text enlargement features. With around 13 percent of adults (opens in a new tab) reporting “trouble” seeing, the ability to increase text size for better visibility is critical to accessibility. Changing the size of digital text can also help many students, with or without a visual impairment, to concentrate and understand better, or simply to read documents on smaller screens such as phones.

• Instant-access dictionary and translation tools. Having to open a new browser tab can be one more barrier. Dictionary and translation tools widen accessibility for students, whether they are discovering new vocabulary or learning a second language.

• Plain text views. Online learning environments are full of distractions. A plain text feature removes images and design elements so that students can concentrate on the course material without interruption.

Ideally, educators make all of these features available to their students through a simple integration with their learning management system (LMS). ReadSpeaker for LMS provides all of these tools and more: it integrates smoothly with the leading LMS platforms to widen digital inclusion in online learning environments. That can help fill the gaps of unfinished learning in distance teaching, whether the class was designed to be online or moved to digital because of the pandemic.

3. Courses are being designed specifically for online channels

In the first days of the pandemic we called the improvised online classroom “emergency remote learning” (opens in a new tab). The results were what you would expect in an emergency: we quickly lost the students’ attention. But online learning can be effective (opens in a new tab), especially after secondary school. All that is needed is to develop learning activities that suit the medium. The time has come to set “emergency learning” aside and approach the remote classroom with a clear purpose. The educational framework known as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a good starting point.

Universal Design for Learning is a teaching approach that puts inclusion first. Like inclusive education, with which it overlaps a great deal, UDL stresses flexibility in reaching students as individuals, meeting their needs and interests wherever those may be. To achieve that, UDL recommends course design that includes:

• Multiple presentations of the course material. Whatever students are learning, teachers should offer it through different media: text, voice, image, activities and more.
• Multiple means of expression for students. One student may prefer to demonstrate knowledge by speaking; another will need to write answers down; a third may work better by drawing. With UDL, students have different ways of showing what they have learned.
• Multiple ways of engaging with the content of the lesson. Students only learn when they engage, and each of them will have different interests and abilities. The UDL framework encourages a variety of learning activities, so that every student can take part in their own way.

The key to UDL is accessibility and, because every student is different, that requires variety. This variety is available online, as the read-aloud and focus tools discussed above demonstrate. All we have to do is set out to build that variety into distance learning environments.

To learn more about how ReadSpeaker tools help with this, read our white paper “Designing for Difference” or watch our free webinar “Bridging the Gap with Assistive Technology: reducing learning loss in online education” (opens in a new tab).

We do not know how the story schools and COVID share will unfold. We do not know how the pandemic will develop, though we hope it will fade away. But we know better than ever how to keep it from causing learning loss and unfinished learning.