According to a review of 42 studies from across the globe, kids lost an average of more than a third of a year of school during the COVID-19 epidemic. Most of this is from the disruption and harm school closures—and the resultant shift to distance learning— did to kid’s mental and physical health. Widespread school closures resulted in extraordinary learning loss among children—a loss that seems unlikely to be fixed.
Published on January 30 by the Nature Human Behaviour journal, the review summarized the results of 42 studies examining COVID-related learning loss from 15 countries around the globe. It found that, on average, the world’s children lost 35 percent of a school year’s worth of learning during the epidemic.
Attempts to compensate for the severe learning loss caused by COVID school closures have been unsuccessful. After kids returned to the classroom, the educational deficits that arose during the epidemic have stayed “incredibly stable,” a sign that COVID-era learning losses are likely to follow children throughout their lives.
As Reason Magazine observes,
The deficits are particularly pronounced in mathematics, which may be because “learning progress in mathematics is more dependent on formal instruction than in reading.” As the analysis notes, “This might be due to parents being better equipped to help their children with reading, and children advancing their reading skills (but not their maths skills) when reading for enjoyment outside of school.”
Learning loss was more pronounced in the middle-income countries, like Mexico and South Africa, included in the analysis. Indeed, middle-income countries accounted for the three highest estimates of learning loss. Studies from low-income countries were excluded due to poor data quality, though researchers note that “learning deficits are likely to be even larger in low-income countries, considering that these countries already faced a learning crisis before the pandemic, generally implemented longer school closures, and were under-resourced and ill-equipped to facilitate remote learning.”
Even in a high-income country like the United States, the magnitude of learning loss remained steep. One study included in the analysis found that the average public school student in third grade through eighth grade lost half a year of math learning and a quarter of a year in reading.
However, two countries studied, Sweden and Denmark, managed to experience no significant learning losses. Sweden famously managed to avoid most school closures during the pandemic and notably never closed primary schools. While Denmark did have school closures, one study theorized that the lack of learning loss could be due to the country’s “reliable digital infrastructure with Denmark being one of the absolute top-scorers in digital skills, broad-band connectivity, and digital public services in Europe.
