There are “small signs” of improvement in students’ academic recovery, but still a long way to go to return to pre-pandemic levels of achievement, concludes a report from Curriculum Associates, a company that provides curriculum and classroom-based testing programs.
Based on an analysis of more than 10 million students in reading and 12 million in math who took the organization’s i-Ready Diagonistic, the proportions of students now performing at grade level are very similar from spring 2023 to spring 2024 across grades and subjects.
Students’ fall 2023-to-spring 2024 academic growth rates are similar to pre-pandemic levels (fall 2018 to spring 2019), too.
But they continue to place behind their pre-pandemic cohorts because they’re starting further behind, according to the report.
That said, the report found a few bright spots in the data.
First, the percentage of kindergarten students placing on grade level in phonics has slightly increased each year since the 2021-22 school year, according to the report. In the 2023-24 school year, for instance, there was a 2.2 percent increase in kindergarten students placing on grade level in phonics.
Phonics are a key part—though not the only part—of learning how to read. In phonics, students learn how sounds represent letters and words and use this knowledge to identify new words on the page.
In schools serving a majority of Black students, there have been small increases each year since the 2021-22 school year in the proportion of students placing on grade level across grades, the report found.
Beyond those slight improvements, however, the data show limited recovery from the two years of uneven instruction, school closures, and online learning that dragged math and reading levels down to their lowest levels in decades.
“The impacts of the pandemic are still evident in student performance, but pockets of recovery offer small signs of hopeful trends,” said Kristen Huff, vice president of research and assessment at Curriculum Associates, in a statement. “We know that all students have the potential to reach grade-level proficiency with high-quality instruction tailored to their individual needs. These data are a call to action to do just that: target the most effective interventions where they are needed the most.”
What do other studies show about learning recovery?
The Curriculum Associates’ report paints a slightly more optimistic picture than the testing group NWEA’s report, published in July. NWEA concluded, based on its MAP Growth formative assessment data, that pandemic recovery has not just stalled but that students in most grades are losing academic ground.
When looking at state standardized test scores, though, researchers have found that student test scores are on a path to recovery, according to an analysis by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and The Education Opportunity Project at Stanford University.
There’s still more to parse about student progress, researchers on that effort said.
“The Harvard and Stanford teams have been working with our counterparts at NWEA (who reported similar results to these i-Ready results) to understand the divergence between the state tests (which our results are based on) and the interim assessments,” said Thomas Kane, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research, in an email. “We will all know a lot more when the 2024 NAEP results are released in January.”
