Thursday, October 31, 2024

Long-term trend scores drop on Nation’s Report Card

-

For the record and as expected, long-term trend data on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the “Nation’s Report Card,” showed a decline in reading and math scores for 9-year-olds.

The test was a special administration given to 9-year-olds to take a snapshot of learning progress during the Covid-19 pandemic. The mean score dropped in math from 241 in 2020 to 234 in 2022, and the mean score dropped in reading from 220 in 2020 to 215 in 2022. The highest obtainable scaled score on the test is 500, and both declines were statistically significant. The drop in math was the first-ever drop, and the drop in reading was the largest drop since 1990.

Lower-performing students experienced greater declines in both subjects than higher-performing students. For example, the mean scaled score in reading for students in the 25th percentile dropped 8 points while the mean for students in the 90th percentile dropped only 2 points.

Although scores at every performance level dropped, a possible explanation for the bigger drop for lower-performing students than for higher-performing students is that higher-performing students had more confidence in their ability to adapt to remote learning than lower-performing students did, perhaps because they had easier access to remote tools and resources and therefore experienced less hardship and disruption in their learning time.

“The moral of the story is that students need to have human contact with a teacher and classmates to learn best,” wrote Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which develops and administers the NAEP. “Virtual learning is a fourth-rate substitute for a real teacher and interaction with peers. Tech companies have told us for years that we should reinvent education by replacing teachers with computers. We now know: Virtual learning is a disaster.”

One thing I want to mention, though, because newspapers often go crazy over the drop in scores and get some things wrong, is that the drop in scores doesn’t mean students who were 9 two years ago lost learning. The 2022 tests were given to a small but diverse sample of this year’s 9-year-olds, whose learning wasn’t assessed on the NAEP in 2020—those were different kids.

Nor does the drop in scores tell us why the scores dropped, although many experts are about as sure as one can be about this sort of thing that remote learning during the pandemic had a lot to do with it, as Ms Ravitch points out.

Paul Katulahttps://news.schoolsdo.org
Paul Katula is the executive editor of the Voxitatis Research Foundation, which publishes this blog. For more information, see the About page.

Recent Posts

2 Md. educators charged with failure to report rape

0
Two educators allegedly failed to report a rape they knew about for several days, resulting in the potential loss of evidence in a child abuse case.

S.F. cracks down on deepfake websites

Teen vaping in the US hits 10-year low

Movie review: Deadpool & Wolverine

Can we just cooperate? Children can.

Oklahoma is not OK with test scores