This chaotic and unprecedented year has barrelled through our lives and brought with it change that none of us could have anticipated. If you’re anything like me, then you keep hoping that the pandemic will one day disappear seemingly as quickly as it turned our lives upside down back in March. Unfortunately, there’s reason to believe that this year’s inconsistencies in K-12 education will cause a ripple effect into all of our futures.
Prior to this year, there were already concerns about extended school breaks and their consequential learning losses. We’ve all seen the glazed looks our kids give us at the tail-end of Summertime when someone has the audacity to ask them what 7 times 8 is. An array of studies have found that school closures during the Summer time consequently slide back knowledge gains from the prior school year, especially in mathematics. Math is hit the hardest due to the cognitive importance of a consistent learning schedule in mathematics retention. Psychologists agree that regular and steady learning of math skills promotes the strongest retention of long-term math understanding.
Summer isn’t the only pre-Covid time that we can look back at to project the impact of this year’s school closures. In order to nationally standardize the beginning of the school year to the Fall, the German federal government planned to have two shortened school years in 1966 and 1967 (the 1966 school year lasted from April to November, and the 1967 school year went from December to July). The students who experienced the two shortened school years received a total of three quarters of a year less instruction than usual. A longitudinal study was performed for this group of students to see what the long term consequences of their school closures would be, if any. Just last year, Franziska Hampf concluded that math skills learning loss can be seen for this group even into their late 60s. This math learning loss translated into an average of 5% wage losses over the course of their working lives (Cygan-Rehm, 2018[27]). Even though Germany planned for the school closures in advance, their negative impact could be seen well into the new millennium.
What learning losses should we expect in our own kids after the world returns to normal (hopefully, as soon as possible!)? At Brown University, Kuhfeld et al. based a series of Covid-19 learning loss projections on prior findings related to absenteeism, regular summer breaks, and school closures. Under their projections, they anticipate that students could lose more than 60% of their math knowledge from the previous year.
Before our kids even ventured into the uncharted waters of distance learning, they were already operating at a tank half-full (this one’s for my optimists out there). With continued irregularity of instruction and curriculum management, students may find themselves grappling with gaps in understanding that could hold them back from making the progress in math that may be expected and needed.
With learning loss likely to be more prevalent than ever due to the chaos the pandemic has unleashed on our educational infrastructure, now is a great time to revisit our approach to math. Our kids are all over the map with their own array of strengths and weaknesses in their math skills, so an individualized approach to their math understanding is key to helping them catch up, keep up, and get ahead. At Mathnasium, your locally owned math-only learning center, we’re finding that more parents than ever are reaching out for supplemental education that caters to exactly what their kid needs so that they can be supported back up the Covid Slide.
Mathnasium of West Palm Beach offers custom math curriculum, expert math instruction,stress-free homework help, and comprehensive math tutoring services to Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, Palm Beach Lakes, Lake Worth, and Riviera Beach. We teach kids math in a way that makes sense to them for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th grades and beyond. We specialize in pre-algebra, fractions, multiplication, and all of the building blocks needed to master algebra and above. We offer specialized instruction in Trigonometry, Geometry, Algebra 2, Pre-Calculus, Statistics, and various higher math topics.
We also offer Test Prep! We'll help you do your absolute best for the PSAT, SAT, ACT, ASVAB, and FSA.
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