Soon-to-be-released study looks at pandemic learning loss among North Carolina students

By Andrew James

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    ASHEVILLE, North Carolina (WLOS) — The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) will soon release the results of a study looking at a learning loss from the pandemic in North Carolina schools.

“It actually looks at the difference between where we expected students to perform and how they actually performed,” said Dr. Michael Maher, Director of the Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration.

Last March, the General Assembly directed NCDPI to take a deeper dive into how students were impacted by school closures, remote learning, and other pandemic challenges.

These questions guided the 6-month research study:

To what extent did the pandemic impact learning for all students in the 2020-21 school year, and were there variations by student group and contextual factors? How do those differences compare to a typical school year? “What we saw in terms of student performance is not the result of anything districts could have done, teachers, principals, other school personnel. There’s nothing anyone could’ve done to mitigate really the impact of COVID over the last 18 months,” said Dr. Maher.

While national studies on learning loss are helpful, he said the NCDPI study looks specifically at North Carolina and is based on population, not samples.

“The challenge, of course, is when you use that national data set, it includes students from across the country and they try to build out a representative sample of students nationally,” Dr. Maher said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean they got a representative sample of students in North Carolina.”

The final results of the study are expected to be released during the State Board of Education meeting next week.

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