Learning During COVID-19: Initial Findings and 4 Considerations for Policymakers

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted traditional forms of education and continues to create challenges for school systems and the students they serve. Education leaders and teachers have the unenviable responsibility of making difficult decisions well into the 2020-21 school year and beyond.

In the spring, NWEA released a set of projections of the potential  academic impact of COVID-19 disruptions modeled on well-documented summer learning loss estimates. Now, with fall data in hand, NWEA is ready to share some key findings and actionable takeaways from recent research based on a sample of more than 8,000 schools across the nation.

This research focused on exploring how school shutdowns impacted student achievement at the start of the 2020-21 academic year. Using data from nearly 4.4 million students in grades 3-8 who took MAP® Growth™ in fall 2020, NWEA  examined the following research questions: How did students perform this fall relative to a typical school year (specifically, fall 2019)? How has student growth changed since schools physically closed in March 2020?