According to the New Hampshire Department of Education, student test scores in math, reading and science took a fall during the pandemic.
In 2019, 48% of students tested proficient or above in math, while in 2021, only 38% did. Reading scores dropped from 56% proficient to 52%, and science scores dropped from 39% to 37% of students testing at or above a proficient level.
Although the lower test scores were expected when students got back to school this fall after more than a year of remote or hybrid learning, districts have had to work extra hard to get their students up to speed while navigating a return to in-person classes.
This year, students have had to relearn how to collaborate with classmates, engage in discussions and leave their devices behind.
It has meant a big shift for everyone at school, and it has taken a lot of work.
“Within our school, I cannot tell you how proud I am of teachers and learners,” Conant High School Assistant Principal of Teaching and Learning Heather Shulman said.
David Dustin, principal of Jaffrey-Rindge Middle School, said the school added an interim assessment this year.
“We’re going those extra steps,” he said. “We are triangulating data to see the trend within each learner.”
The school district is also implementing a summer academy for grades six through 12. They hope this will help continue building skills that students fell behind on and will give high school students the opportunity to make up failed courses.
Although middle- and high-school students have missed important years of growth and education in the last few years, teachers and administrators remain hopeful that most will be able to bounce back. For elementary students, it’s harder to tell.
“What is going to happen when we get those students who have missed major building blocks as young kids?” asked Sean O’Mara, an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Keene Middle School.
O’Mara has noticed that some of his students got used to learning through a device during the pandemic, and the switch back to in-person learning this year has been challenging for them.
“Some kids are having a hard time shifting back – not being tethered to a device.” O’Mara said, explaining that a Zoom or Google Meet screen can act as a “veil between you and the rest of the class. Some students became comfortable retreating to anonymity.” And not only were students learning over a screen, they were communicating with each other over devices as well.
O’Mara said from what he has observed, students are “living [through screens] in a way they weren’t before. They’re not in a habit of separating from their phones.”
He added that online interactions probably helped students feel connected and less alone during the most-isolating parts of the pandemic, and now students treat their phones “almost like a security blanket.” He explained that it has been difficult for teachers to enforce rules about when phones can and can’t be used, even during class.
Students also got used to working and learning alone, and it has been difficult for some to collaborate with others in-person this year. Now that they are back in school with “more opportunity for discussions, debate, and dialogue, it’s harder to get kids to engage,” O’Mara explained.
In addition, he has noticed “writing skills in general not quite where they should be,” a trend that can be seen in standardized testing scores throughout the state.
O’Mara’s wife, Jenna Spear, an educator with the Harris Center for Conservation Education in Hancock, works with elementary school students and has noticed some holes in their understanding of basic science concepts when she visits classes.
“Pre-COVID, I could assume kids knew what a mammal was, maybe even a wild mammal, but this year there’s no base knowledge about any of these things,” she said.
One fourth-grader she worked with was convinced a woolly bear caterpillar was a mammal, and she taught a group of second-graders who didn’t have a basic understanding of how to estimate temperature.
“It seems really simple, but those morning routines were missing,” Spear said, referring to routines that may have involved the class sitting together and talking about the weather, telling time and sharing observations about the world.
Spear said elementary school teachers are focussing heavily on literacy and math skills to ensure that a basic educational foundation is in place.
The pandemic has forced teachers and school districts to really reflect on how technology and the modern world is affecting learning and the ways in which students learn best.
“There has been a gradual shift to higher-level thinking and personalizing of learning. The pandemic has accelerated that shift,” Dustin said. Teachers are focussing less on individual test scores and more on how they can help their students fully understand concepts.
O’Mara emphasized that the pandemic and remote learning was “not the same for every kid. There are gaps between kids who have a lot of support at home and those who don’t.”
He said the students who have supportive home environments are catching up quicker than those who don’t. Some students had parents making sure they were going to online classes and completing homework all last year, while others might have logged in but never turned their camera on, and a lot just didn’t show up at all.
Students missing remote learning classes was commonplace throughout the region.
“Our truancy numbers spiked every time we were fully remote,” said Dustin. He said this year teachers at the school have “focussed on closing the gap, helping learners reset.”
O’Mara said the disparity between students isn’t anything new, but the pandemic made it much more obvious without the background of a classroom, a school building.
“It was much harder for kids who had more responsibility at home, who didn’t have their own room, who had to share devices,” he explained. Certain students were already at a disadvantage, he said, and going remote put them on wildly different playing fields.