Researchers saw promising signs of a slow-moving rebound in student achievement this fall, more than a year after a dire spring where performance “bottomed out.”

As U.S. students in August and September began their fourth school year under the shroud of COVID-19, researchers from NWEA, the nonprofit behind the widely used MAP Growth assessment, took an early look at their achievement. The data suggest that gaps between pre- and post-pandemic performance have been slowly shrinking.

Among the biggest contributors, for reasons researchers don’t quite understand: In 2022, the typical “summer slide” didn’t slide quite as much, giving kids a small advantage as the school year began.

The new findings are “evidence of resiliency on the part of students,” said Karyn Lewis, director of NWEA’s Center for School and Progress. “I think we’re seeing some buoyancy in terms of students’ achievement levels. That’s a testament to simply getting back in the classroom, being reconnected to their peers and their teachers.”

But in a more sobering finding, NWEA found that the youngest students in the study — third-graders who were kindergarteners when the pandemic closed their schools — showed the largest reading achievement gaps and the least “rebounding” from previous tests.

In reading, third-graders reduced their widest achievement gaps by just 10%, far less than other groups. By contrast, sixth-graders’ gaps shrank by 38%. The research found similarly small reductions for third-graders in math.

“That suggests to me it was really detrimental for those kiddos to be doing Zoom school in kindergarten to pick up on some of those foundational reading skills,” said Lewis. “And then for kids that return to the classroom in first grade, imagine trying to learn phonics with your teacher wearing a mask.”

These young students’ reading improvement was slower than their math improvement, researchers found. And they estimate that it will take them at least five years to fully recover from the pandemic in both reading and math, longer than nearly any other group studied except current eighth-graders. Given the five-year time horizon, many of those students may never fully get up to speed in either subject by the time they finish high school, they warn.

Read the full article about learning loss in early education by Greg Toppo at The 74.