Words matter. Assessments of student proficiency attainment after three semesters or more of pandemic instruction indicate significant drops in performance in math, reading, and ELA. These data indicate both lost learning and missed learning. Lost and missed learning extends far beyond these three academic subjects. Every curriculum taught displays the same lost and missed problem – art to zoology. Math, reading and ELA are highlighted only because we have hard data. These two concepts – lost and missed learning – drive our end-of-pandemic efforts to cause all children to return to levels of pre-pandemic proficiencies. Lost learning is a tier 2 instructional challenge and missed learning is a tier 1 challenge. We can recover and reconstruct what was lost and teach anew what was missed.
What We Know?
Learning loss is associated with a child’s capacity to access prior learning. Retention theory tells us that repetition, opportunity for new applications, and adding greater meaning to learned content and skills build a child’s capacity to access and use what has been learned. In a nutshell, we practice newly learned knowledge and skills not to make what is learned perfect but to make it more permanent and stronger for our access. Without retentive practices easy and facile access to memory declines and we begin to lose immediate knowledge recall and sharp skill performance. This is lost learning.
Missed learning is not a retention issue, because what was missed was never taught. It is not lost, because it was not learned. Consider the body of a child’s learning to be Swiss cheese. Most of the learning is solidly learned. The holes prevalent in Swiss cheese are not lost learning but learning that did not take occur and could not form a firm and solid basis for future referencing.
The largest cause of missed learning is the child’s absence from teaching and learning. It is the Cartesian statement of education. “If teaching takes place without students being engaged, learning never happened.”
Examples of Lost Learning
Picture these situations. A child in the intermediate grades was learning to multiply fractions in February 2019 when learning was disrupted by the move to remote education. The teacher relying on a series of concept and skill building lessons to develop a child’s understanding of the mathematical manipulations required to multiply fractions saw time on task between teacher, student, and instruction stop as the school doors closed. Add the stories of every child engaged in new learning – a kindergarten child learning to decode letters into sounds, a child learning rules of capitalization or use of commas, or to avoid run-on sentences – to our understanding of learning loss. Consider a high schooler in Algebra who was learning to use quadratic equations and to balance covalence in chemistry. Opportunities for constructive retention, application, and expanded meaning of new learning were unavailable resulting in dissipation of memory-knowledge and skill work.
Lost learning is not like dropping a valuable necklace over the railing of the Titanic so that it may never be recovered from the abyss of ocean. Learning is not gone forever. Learning loss is more like a paragraph written that is inadvertently deleted. The writer still has some memory of the words, sentences, and idea being expressed and rewriting can reconstruct what is lost. With some technical help, what was lost may be recovered. Lost learning can be relearned and strengthened. If learned successful the first time, there is no need to correct errors or bad habits. Recovering lost learning can be efficiently achieved in short order with diagnostic and prescriptive teaching.
So it is with children returning to daily in-person instruction with their classmates and teacher. Where they left off in their interrupted learning can be recovered and reconstructed and they can make forward progress with new learning.
Some children regained access to continuous learning through strong virtual connections to their classroom teacher. Children who returned to in-person teaching and learning regained connection to continuous instruction. However, children who did not have strong Internet connectivity or whose school substituted vendor-provided curriculum for the school’s curricula lost touch.
Consider the 90 academic school days in the 2019-20 spring semester. Campuses closed. It took time to move from in-person teaching and learning to virtual teaching and learning. It took time for schools to provide teachers with the technology of remote education and for teachers to gain proficiency in teaching through cameras. It took time for families to stabilize their supervision of children as at-home learners. It took time for children to connect their devices or school-provided devices via the Internet and to engage with remote teaching. Some children made speedy connections and did not miss significant teaching. Other children were spotty in their connection and support of remote learning and suffered recurring misses of teaching. And, some children were so disconnected and unsupported that they missed most of the significant teaching of that semester.
Examples of Missed Learning
Missed learning also occurred in the 2020-21 school year. Inconsistent Internet plagued without reliable connectivity. Quarantining protocols closed classrooms and schools and the movement between in-person to remote and remote back to in-person caused missed learning. Teachers with positive tests or close contact were quarantined and regardless of the substitute teacher on-going learning created misses.
Missed learning also arises when children move from the school’s curriculum to an alternative yet are accountable through assessments to the school curriculum. Any child whose parent chose home schooling or enrollment in an alternative site and then returned to her home school this fall probably displayed holes in her proficiency on the school’s annual fall screening assessments.
The Fix Is Needs-based Differentiation
Remedying lost and missed learning is differentiated instruction 101. The differentiation is keyed to each child’s learning needs. End-of-pandemic classrooms will have children at different proficiency points in the annual curriculum. Or, in all the curriculum they must learn in the pandemic years. It is impossible to treat lost and missed learning as a whole group or whole class or whole grade level issue. The problem is individualized and this necessitates teacher use of diagnosed and prescribed differentiated instruction.
https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/what-differentiated-instruction-really-means
Lost and missed learning are tier 1 and tier 2 instructional issues. Why? Neither lost nor missed learning are functions of incomplete, unsuccessful, or mistakes in learning or learning that is challenged by a disability that require tier 3 intervention.
Fixing lost and missed and learning requires the teacher to be very diagnostic in analyzing each child’s fall screening assessments and matching the results with her knowledge of the child’s educational experiences in 2019-20 and 2020-21. If the child received initial in-person teaching and learning of assessed content or skills and demonstrates underachievement this fall, the first consideration should be lost learning. There was not adequate retentive practice to reinforce the initial instruction.
Focused tier 1 teaching to all children will refresh the initial learning they had in the past. For some, the refresh will be enough to re-engage lost knowledge and skills. Generalized and focused tier 1 teaching may also be used strengthen initial learning for all. Refreshing involves rehearing, rereading, renewing hands-on work and re-experiencing what was once learned. It is the proverbial person who once learned to ride a bicycle getting back on the bike. Some pedaling and balancing is necessary to regain bike riding skills.
Identifying individual children who need more than generalized tier 1 instruction creates groups within the class needed more drill and practice and extending instruction on the lost content and skills. These children had just a “brush” with initial learning and not sufficient interaction to build quickly recoverable access. Re-experiencing is combined with drill and practice in tier 2 to build strength of knowledge recall and skill usage. Tier 2 group work can be fit into the normal and daily activities of the class. Children not needing to recover the lost learning can be grouped for or directed to personal enrichment of ongoing learning.
Missed learning requires tier 1 initial instruction. The teacher must treat this as new teaching and learning even though other children may have learned this teaching semesters ago. The teacher uses all the good practices of lesson design for initial learning to assure children have adequate background preparation, can identify purpose and immediate goals, and are ready for chunks of instruction. Missed learning requires opportunity for practice, formative assessment, feedback between teacher and child, strengthening practice and summative assessments over time.
One critical issue with lost and missed learning arises in the teacher’s scaffolding of current and future instruction. Due to the pandemic, a teacher cannot assume each child is ready to ascend the scaffolded curriculum. The teacher must assure readiness by backfilling lost and missed learning prior to advancing the class as a group on the scaffold.
When Will It Be Soup?
Good question. Being soup is the colloquial for telling us that children have been made complete in their pandemic education. Whatever was lost or missed was recovered or reconstructed or taught anew. Soup is when each child and all children can achieve the school’s grade level and subject curricular proficiency standards. Locally, we will not soup soon. The first order of business is determined what is lost and missed. The second order is prescriptive tier 1 and tier 2 teaching to recover and teach what was lost and missed. The third order is to use retention theory practices to reinforce and make permanent these pandemic teachings. The fourth and largest order is to do all this while moving each and all children forward with their ongoing 2021-22 annual curricula. The same statements hold for 21-22 as they held for 19-20 and 20-21: children get only one academic year to learn these annual curricula. In 2021-22, we have a lot of teaching and learning to accomplish.