Late last month, I had the privilege of moderating a panel on “Filling the Void: Setting the Academic Research Agenda for Education.” I was joined by Kristen Huff from Curriculum Associates, Karyn Lewis from NWEA, and Tom Kane from Harvard.
As I wrote in my preview for the event, achievement scores had been going up in this country for at least half a century. Those gains were broadly shared across student groups. The top students gained ground, but so did lower-performing students. The scores for Black, White, Hispanic, English Learners, and students with disabilities were all going up.
And then, something happened around 2012-2015 that caused student achievement scores to plateau and begin to fall. Not only that, but the lowest-performing students started to see the biggest declines. These declines started before COVID, but the pandemic made them much worse.
So how do we get kids back on track? How do we learn what went wrong and what to do to get things moving in the right direction again? Watch the video recording to see answers from Huff, Lewis, and Kane.
Looming over the conversation was the recognition that the federal government may not be a partner in this work. The feds have scaled back on their investments in data and research, and outside groups will need to step up and be creative about identifying the right research questions to move the needle for students.
Here, I wanted to follow up on some of the key takeaways and lingering questions that audience members raised.
What parents can do
Per the points about technology, schools can only do so much. According to a recent report, fewer parents are reading to their young kids at home. That means fewer kids are being exposed to stories that build their knowledge about the world and their vocabularies. These skills are fundamental to learning.
Here at EduProgress, we think parents can play an important role in helping their kids build confidence in math. Cooking at home, playing games, or working on home projects can help ensure that all kids are math kids.
Attendance and chronic absenteeism
Kids can’t learn if they’re not in school, and the rise in chronic absenteeism rates over the last few years is part of the story for why achievement has continued to fall and why recovery efforts have been so challenging.
More research is needed on what schools can do to get kids back in school, and what schools with better attendance records are doing differently. Is it health concerns? School anxiety issues, especially in math? Or something else? And how do student absences affect peers and the broader school culture? States now collect a lot of data about student attendance, and schools are trying lots of different strategies to move the needle, but more research is needed on what’s working and what’s not.
The disconnect between grades and test scores
Student grades have continued to rise even as test scores fall. If kids are being told by their teachers that they’re doing fine, and parents don’t know that their kids are actually behind, what affect does this disconnect have on students and families? We know a little bit about how lowering standards affects students, but we could benefit from more research connecting classroom expectations, student effort, short-term learning gains, and long-term benefits.
Student behavioral issues
Along with missing more days, teachers note that student behavior has gotten worse. Kids have shorter attention spans and are more likely to disrupt class or lash out verbally or physically. Surely these problems affect student academics as well, but there’s not much research tracing behavioral issues and their effects on both individual students and a school’s culture. More importantly, how do schools respond in ways that are both fair to the offending student and protective of the broader learning environment?
Technology/ cell phones/ social media
Coincidence or not, the achievement declines started to take shape here in the U.S. at the same time that cell phones became ubiquitous and social media took off. State policymakers are now trying to ban cell phones from classrooms, and I’m optimistic those policies will help. But how much? Will they improve rates of student depression and bullying, improve student attention spans, or both? And how will the bans affect different students differently?
More pressingly, cell phone bans only affect kids during the school day. They still have plenty of distractions available to them at home, and both kids and adults alike are reading less for pleasure than they did in the past. We have a lot more to learn about technology’s effects on our ability to focus and what interventions can help kids build those skills.
We only had an hour for the webinar, but I hope you’ll check it out. There’s a lot of work to be done, and we all have a role to play in filling the void.