What Gets in the Way of Learning to Read, and the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic
“The more you have to gain in reading, the more you have to lose.” This was the core conclusion Dr. Joanna Christodolou walked her listeners through in a recent Cambridge School Volunteers’ professional development session for its volunteers in the city’s public schools.
Student Progress in Reading: Pandemic Effects
Books available to choose at a recent CSV Reading Buddies session at Fletcher Maynard Academy.
Research on the effects of the first three years of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning has only recently revealed the impacts in detail. Dr. Christodolou is not only one of the researchers involved, but an expert on reading disorders. Her work centers on reading, math, attention, brain plasticity, and the factors that help or hinder learning.
Many people use the phrase learning loss to describe students' experience while instruction was fully or partially remote due to COVID-19. Dr. Christodoulou questioned whether these two words should be the framework of the conversation about education during the pandemic.
“I caution people against describing what happened this way,” says Dr. Christodoulou, who is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and director of the Brain, Education, and Mind (BEAM) Lab in the Center for Health and Rehabilitation Research at the MGH Institute of Health Professions. She suggests the term learning loss may not be as productive as “looking at the systems—and inefficiencies in certain contexts”—in other words, what gives rise to ‘learning loss.’” (See image at the bottom of this page.)
Risk and Resilience
Even prior to the pandemic, reading researchers have long known that socioeconomic status (SES) is a major predictor of student success. SES does not, however, correspond to a student’s potential. Why? The brain has plasticity.
Interventions and environment matter. For example, after teachers assess new Kindergarteners in reading, those who are students from low SES households show steep gains in reading thereafter—once they are in school. Protective factors, such as time and effort put into teaching reading and reading-supportive skills at school, can be highly effective.
Dr. Joanna A. Christodoulou
Dr. Christodoulou says that one-to-one work with children is known to help them overcome the challenges of reading disorders. Just as the risks to reading success associated with SES, like toxic stress and lack of resources, were known to play a large role in learning before the pandemic—and were in fact exacerbated by the first 2–3 years of COVID-19—so too are the solutions the same. Pre-pandemic resilience strategies are applicable to helping children make up what has been called “Covid Slide.”
Dr. Christodoulou and other researchers have measured and understood the mechanisms of “summer slide,” the three-month break from school and formal learning. When COVID hit, she says, “those same frameworks were replicated.”
“I want to acknowledge that it takes a system, a community, and so many different stakeholders for reading to emerge,” she said. Dr. Christodoulou then connected the work volunteer tutors and classroom assistants do to supporting students in reading.
“If we can’t change the system overnight, doing what we can in the short term is important. This speaks so highly of the role you personally are doing.”
Dr. Christodoulou’s presentation included these views on the idea of “Learning Loss.”