in In the 2021-22 school year, chronic absenteeism rates among U.S. K-12 students offered only remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic were 6.9 percentage points higher than students attending in-person-only schools, and increased by 10.6 percentage points for at-risk students. JAMA Network Open study It was released yesterday.
Using a difference-in-differences framework, researchers from the University of Notre Dame analyzed data from 22,034 observations across 11,017 school districts for the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years. The dataset represents approximately 87% of all students.
The number of chronically absent students is reported to the National Center for Education Statistics by each grade level, school district, and local education agency. Chronic absence is defined as missing 10% or more of the school days in a year.
“Chronic absenteeism is associated with several adverse outcomes, including lower test scores, reduced educational and social participation, lower high school completion rates, and higher rates of substance use,” the researchers noted.
Poverty leads to increased absenteeism
in During the 2020-21 school year, an average of 39.3% of instructional days were in-person, 33.9% were hybrid and 26.8% were virtual.
Chronic absenteeism increased 13.5 percentage points from an average of 15.9% in 2018-2019 to 29.4% in 2021-22. Students attending school 100% virtual had absenteeism rates 6.9 percentage points higher than students attending school only in-person. Hybrid learning was not associated with increased absenteeism.
The association between virtual instruction and chronic absenteeism varied by socioeconomic status, with the conditional correlation being much higher for at-risk students: The share of students learning from home in school districts in the top quintile of poverty was 10.6 percentage points higher than the share of students in districts with in-person-only learning.
Can bad results be undone?
“Accumulating evidence… suggests that online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has been harmful to students' educational development and mental health,” the authors wrote.
They said questions remain for parents, educators, academics and the medical community.
Accumulating evidence suggests that virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has had negative effects on students' educational development and mental health.
“First, how can we eliminate these negative effects? Teacher surveys show that “School administrators believe that online instruction will remain a staple of K-12 education even after the pandemic has passed,” they wrote.
“A second key question is how to deliver virtual learning in K-12 education without these potential negative consequences,” the researchers added. “Educators and policymakers must be prepared to implement evidence-based policies and practices for online learning going forward.”
The researchers said reducing chronic absenteeism and learning how to utilize remote instruction without negative outcomes are key for policymaking. “Important future challenges include understanding whether the results are causal and why lower school district income is associated with poorer outcomes,” the researchers concluded.