The report from Curriculum Associates, a company that provides curriculum and classroom-based testing programs, concluded that while there have been “small signs of improvement” in student achievement recovery, there is still a long way to go to return to pre-pandemic performance levels.
Based on an analysis of over 10 million reading and 12 million math students The percentage of students who received the organization’s i-Ready Diagonistic who are currently performing at grade level is very similar across grade levels and subjects from spring 2023 to spring 2024.
Student academic achievement gains from fall 2023 to spring 2024 will also be similar to pre-pandemic levels (fall 2018 to spring 2019).
But they continue to rank lower, as they started even later than their pre-pandemic peers, according to the report.
Still, the report found some bright spots in the data.
First, the percentage of kindergartners who were on grade level in phonics has increased slightly each year since the 2021-22 school year, according to the report. For example, in the 2023-24 school year, there was a 2.2 percent increase in kindergartners who were on grade level in phonics.
Phonics is an important component of learning to read, but not the only component: In phonics, students learn how sounds represent letters and words and then use this knowledge to identify new words on the page.
The report found that in schools with majority-Black students, the percentage of students performing at grade level has increased slightly each year since the 2021-22 school year.
But beyond these slight gains, the data shows limited recovery from two years of uneven instruction, school closures and online learning that have pushed students to the lowest levels in math and reading. Over several decades.
“While the effects of the pandemic are still being felt in student achievement, there are signs of recovery and some hope,” Kristen Huff, vice president of research and evaluation at Curriculum Associates, said in a statement. “We know that all students have the potential to reach grade-level proficiency when they receive high-quality instruction tailored to their individual needs. These data are a call to action to do just that: targeting the most effective interventions where they are needed most.”
What does other research on learning recovery show?
The Curriculum Associates report paints a slightly more optimistic picture than the testing group NWEA's report.An NWEA report released in July, based on MAP Growth formative assessment data, concluded that not only is recovery from the pandemic stalling, but students in most grades are also experiencing academic declines.
But when looking at state standardized test scores, researchers found that student test scores are on the road to recovery, according to an analysis by the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research and Stanford University's Educational Opportunity Project..
Researchers involved in the effort said there is still much to analyze about student progress.
“The Harvard and Stanford teams have been working with their counterparts at NWEA (which reports results similar to those of i-Ready) to understand discrepancies between state tests (on which our results are based) and midterm assessments,” Thomas Cain, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the Center for Education Policy Research, said in an email. “We will know more once the 2024 NAEP results are released in January.”