Learning in the Time of COVID

Learning in the Time of COVID

There’s a lot at stake as parents and students grapple with learning gaps and the uncertainties of what it will take to catch up from COVID. Add financial impacts to the logistical and emotional challenges educators and parents are experiencing.  Estimates are that learning lost during COVID will drag the economy down as much as $300 to $500 billion a year, on an ongoing basis, even if schools go back to normal operation within the next year.

Predictions for the amount of learning lost since schools shut down and/or moved to remote learning in March are dramatic. Even more dramatic is the variability suggested by more recent analysis.

For many educators, the wide variation in what students learned and still know from the 2019-2020 school year bespeaks a need for more personalized learning and ways to identify learning gaps.

Many parents trying to keep learning going at home discovered that their students were already struggling academically in ways they hadn’t realized and felt helpless in addressing.

In this webinar, we will explore what is known and predicted about COVID learning gaps, how learning can be accelerated through assessments not of what children have learned but how they learn, and how essential it is to build students’ cognitive infrastructure so that the longstanding gaps among student groups can close rather than widen as drastically as appears to be happening.