Covid-19 and education: The lingering effects of unfinished learning

> we analyzed Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready in-school assessment results of more than 1.6 million elementary school students across more than 40 states. We compared students’ performance in the spring of 2021 with the performance of similar students prior to the pandemic. Students testing in 2021 were about ten points behind in math and nine points behind in reading, compared with matched students in previous years.

> To get a sense of the magnitude of these gaps, we translated these differences in scores to a more intuitive measure—months of learning. Although there is no perfect way to make this translation, we can get a sense of how far students are behind by comparing the levels students attained this spring with the growth in learning that usually occurs from one grade level to the next. We found that this cohort of students is five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, compared with where we would expect them to be based on historical data.