Panel A.01 — Academic Learning Losses “in” and “after” the Pandemic: Data, Policies, and Analyses
Convenors Louis Volante (Brock University, Canada); Giancola Orazio (Sapienza Universita Di Roma, Italy)
Keywords Pandemic; Learning Loss; Education Policies; European Union.
In every industrialised country, COVID-19 led to school disruptions, and in most cases, successive weeks of closures with instruction shifted online to help reduce the risk of transmission and keep students safe. Understandably, parents, educators, and policymakers around the world are concerned about the short and long-term impacts associated with the loss of face-to-face instruction and social isolation measures. For the most part, researchers have begun to tackle this timely issue by examining the “learning losses” associated with school disruptions and closures. Simply put, learning loss research attempts to quantify, using large-scale student assessment results, the degree of progress, or lack thereof, in core subject areas such as reading, mathematics, and/or science that have resulted from interruptions to in-person schooling.
Collectively, this body of research suggests that learning stalled during the pandemic and that at-risk socioeconomically disadvantaged K-12 student populations were di