As the lockdowns in Sydney extend, so will the way students across the state will learn. Households sorting through technology problems, internet slowness, web cams not working and forgetting the student login/password are common problems. It’s the current climate we live in and so teachers and students have to adapt to this paradigm shift. Teachers have been doing an amazing job preparing learning material, logging into Zoom calls and marking student work after school. It’s much harder to teach 20-30 students remotely and so we appreciate all the efforts of our teachers. Our praise goes out to all teachers working through challenging times.
Have you ever thought what has been the impact to your child’s learning during covid? A study that was conducted in The Netherlands evaluated the effects of school closures on primary school students (350,000 students). The data compared national examinations before and after lockdown with the progress of the previous 3 years. This is considering Netherlands underwent a relatively short lockdown (8 weeks) and schools had one of the world’s highest rates of broadband access. The results revealed a learning loss of about 3 percentile points or an equivalent to one-fifth of a school year. “The findings implied that students made little or no progress while learning from home and suggest losses even larger in countries with weaker infrastructure or longer school closures”.
Although there isn’t empirical evidence in Australia, you can imagine if a child is struggling on a particular topic, how could they get help? Scheduling a time after school with the teacher can be difficult. Parents might not be able to explain some concepts that help the child to understand. Parents are also juggling working from home or running a business. A topic like fractions moves to the side and something they can do “later”. The issue with schools is that once a topic is taught, the curriculum moves on for the benefit of the class. That topic of fractions eventually becomes missed and a student moves to year 4 not understanding the fundamental concepts of fractions.
If a student has a gap in understanding the concept of a half, you can image how they will struggle when asked to work out the Area of a Triangle - its ½ x base x height. These gaps becomes more evident as they move to later years in school when they work though more difficult geometric shapes.
At Mathnasium, we are here to help! Join the hundreds of parents who are taking action doing something about the learning loss that covid has introduced. Mathnasium's customized learning plans are proven to improve grades. We pinpoint each individual child's leaning needs through a personalized assessment, before developing a roadmap that is unique to each student. This enables the student to learn faster rather than a one size fits all approach.
References - Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic (pnas.org)
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