New research may help educators and families unravel exactly how the COVID-19 pandemic has led to such an unprecedented academic decline. It suggests the cause lies in something fundamental and crucial: children’s ability to think, remember and solve problems.
And here’s a surprise: teachers also face the same core problems.
The findings, detailed in a new working paper, are expected to be the first to point to brain changes that explain students’ suffering both in and out of the classroom since the pandemic forced millions of people out of the classroom.
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Nancy Tsai, a psychologist at Harvard University who studies the effects of stress on executive function and is the study’s lead author, said the new findings offer the first evidence to help us understand “the ‘why'” of the pandemic downturn — “what’s actually causing all of these problems that we’re seeing in the news and talking about.”
The paper, from private tutoring agency MindPrint Learning, examines the cognitive skills of schoolchildren in the United States and finds that children’s brains, known for their constant change, have actually gotten worse in recent years.
Since the start of the pandemic, students of all ages and economic levels have shown weaker memory and “flexible thinking” skills — the mental bandwidth needed to multitask, switch from one activity to another and juggle the demands of the day. But for a few groups, such as younger and lower-income children, the changes have been more dramatic.
They also show that their teachers’ brains are weaker in nearly identical ways, which could explain the high rates of frustration and burnout. They suggest that school districts have their hands full trying to keep their best workers on the payroll and returning to the classroom each fall.
Understanding the ‘why’ of the pandemic downturn
The data come from a large, widely used assessment, the Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery, developed in 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania. It consists of a battery of cognitive tasks that measure subjects’ accuracy and speed in several key cognitive domains, including working memory, abstraction, sustained attention, episodic memory and processing speed.
MindPrint has administered the assessment to its clients periodically over the past decade. The most recent rounds included 35,000 students and 4,000 teachers in 27 states.
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By most measures, American students are suffering. Last year, NAEP scores showed that the average math comprehension of 13-year-olds fell to levels last seen in the 1990s, and reading proficiency dropped to levels last seen in 1971, when the test was first administered.
More recent research has shown that older children are showing encouraging signs of academic recovery, while younger children are not making the same progress. Many students who weren’t even in formal school when COVID hit are already falling behind — especially in math.
The Penn study found that children who entered elementary school or preschool during the pandemic and are now between the ages of 8 and 13 showed the greatest decline in memory.
“Younger kids haven’t really developed a lot of these basic cognitive skills,” Tsai said. “It’s not been cemented for them, either through development or through practice in the classroom. And so younger kids are more vulnerable to these pandemic shifts.”
Younger children are more vulnerable to these pandemic changes.
Nancy Tsai, Harvard University
But students across all age groups showed poorer levels of flexible thinking, which researchers now say contributes to lower academic performance – and challenging behavior.
Tsai said children from lower-income families are more vulnerable to these changes, particularly in verbal reasoning and verbal memory, than their higher-income peers. They show greater declines in verbal scores, which are closely related to academic performance across all subjects.
Adults in the study showed similar declines in both memory and flexible thinking, which may explain the higher reported levels of teacher dissatisfaction and low morale.
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Nancy Weinstein, CEO of MindPrint, said that poorer flexible thinking isn’t necessarily a problem for experienced teachers, who have developed strategies to deal with stressful situations and can adjust plans on the fly. But those with less experience may not be able to switch gears when lessons go awry or students misbehave in class. That can lead to higher teacher burnout.
In general, teachers’ skills deteriorated in verbal and abstract reasoning, spatial insight, attention and working memory. However, the greatest decline was observed in verbal memory and flexible thinking.
“If we care about that, we need to know how to help them,” Weinstein said. “And there are some tried and true things you can do.”
She said schools should consider sharing this kind of data with teachers so they can understand that their frustration in the classroom isn’t just the students’ fault. That could make a big difference, she said, in “their willingness to make an effort to change, rather than saying, ‘Why bother?'”
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For students, Weinstein said, it might help to give them more opportunities to practice skills with breaks and rest between study sessions. Schools should also consider “scaffolded memorization” techniques that break down learning into chunks and tackle each one separately.
Could such techniques help students—and teachers—regain some of their pre-pandemic skills? According to Weinstein, the answer is yes.
“The environment will matter, but we can certainly get some of that back if we do the right things,” she said. “And we know what the right things are to do.”
Crystal Green-Braswell, staff wellness and culture coordinator for the Little Rock School District in Arkansas, said offering the Penn assessment to teachers and staff has helped many think more deeply about their work — and their own thinking.
“People who have had the assessment will say, ‘You know my processing speed is slower, so you need to give me some time,’” she said.
That’s a huge change in a profession where most workers are expected to “remove themselves from the equation and just do the job,” Green-Braswell said.
She sees offering such insights to teachers as part of the “rehumanization” of teaching. “When we offer these kinds of assessments and we offer this kind of space for people to really get to know themselves, we humanize this profession and help people realize, ‘You have a role. You play an active role. You matter.’”
