A new study published Wednesday shows the combined impact of academic, social and emotional learning loss in high school students who learned remotely compared to students who learned in-person last year.
What We Know:
- The study, entitled “Students Attending School Remotely Suffer Socially, Emotionally, and Academically”, was published in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. In the study, they coin the term “thriving gap” to refer to the negative repercussions that were nearly universal among remote learners. While many news sources have reported individual stories concerning mental health challenges students have faced, this is the first study that’s been able to display widespread evidence.
- Angela Duckworth, professor at the University of Pennsylvania and founder and CEO of Character Lab, was the lead author of the study. She said, “This study gives some of the first empirical evidence of how learning remotely has affected adolescent well-being.” The evidence in the study was gathered through an ongoing partnership with Orange County Public Schools, a large and demographically diverse public school district in Florida. The authors had distributed a survey called the Character Lab Student Thriving Index in February 2020 before the pandemic shut down schools. 6,500 students were asked about their current social, emotional, and academic experiences.
- Later, months into the shutdown, families in the district were offered the option for their kids to return to school either remotely or in person. Two-thirds of the students went remote and one-third returned to in-person. All of them completed the same index in October of 2020. Results showed remote students suffered socially, emotionally, and academically in comparison to their in-person counterparts. Though the impacts were not large in magnitude, the fact that they span gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status means they affect millions of students.
- The CDC’s recommendations for school re-openings emphasize the importance of in-person learning for students, but Duckworth says it’s more than just academics. She went on to say, “As policymakers gear up for national tutoring and remediation programs, which we agree are urgent priorities, we must recognize that our nation’s students are not just lagging in performances, they are suffering as people. Meeting their intrinsic psychological needs — for social connection, for positive emotion, and authentic intellectual engagement — is a challenge that cannot wait.”
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is pushing for all students to return to the classroom this upcoming school year. He said in a statement, “Students learn best in the classroom. I think they’ve suffered enough through the pandemic. It’s on us now to make sure we are doing what we need to do to make sure we’re getting them safely in the classroom.”
