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TheSkimm
New Scores Show Pandemicâs Impact on Education, But Donât Panic (November 1, 2021)
The report shows that some kids who were already low performing lost even more ground than students at the top of their class. This was especially true in math for fourth graders.
âParticularly in math, there are a set of foundational skills that build on each other. Those students in particular didn't have as much of an opportunity to catch up with some of that unfinished learning,â said Chase Nordengren, PhD, the principal research lead for Effective Instructional Strategies at NWEA (a nonprofit that creates academic assessments for students pre-K-12).
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The 74
A Problem for Math Teachers: Solving the Dilemma of Learning Lost to a Year of Zoom (May 25, 2021)
Nordengren, of NWEA, advises teachers to take the time to understand each childâs abilities and be sure not to waste precious time reteaching concepts they have already mastered or skipping ahead to topics for which they are unprepared.
He said parents can help, too, by incorporating math in their everyday life â grocery store check-out lines can provide a great opportunity to consider addition, subtraction, percentages and other, more complex topics â and by not speaking negatively about the subject in front of their children.
âIf you have a parent that says, âIâm not a math person,â or âWe are not math people,â that will put that deficit mindset into a kidâs brain,â Nordengren said. -
KXLY (Spokane, WA)
Four things to do this summer to get kids ready for school this fall (May 6, 2021)
âIf [students are] dedicated to it and theyâre able to connect that with their own goals, it is definitely possible to make really impressive learning in a short amount of time,â said Nordengren.
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Vox
The debate over how to handle kidsâ âlost yearâ of learning (April 23, 2021)
More broadly, some say thereâs a danger in simply assuming that particular kids have lost ground academically because of their race or family income. Thatâs because if schools overestimate studentsâ learning loss, they may fail to give them grade-level work, pushing them even further behind, Chase Nordengren, a senior research scientist with NWEA, told Vox. âAssumptions are really a threat to equity, because they limit the kinds of experiences that students have access to.â
Even as we acknowledge inequities in access, Nordengren said, itâs important to âunderstand that every student is different, and when we come back this fall, every studentâs individual level of proficiency is going to need to be understood really well.â -
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Pressure to reopen schools continues to increase in Pittsburgh and elsewhere (March 7, 2021)
â[Itâs important] to get in with students and understand what they now know and can do and begin to chart out a path for individual students for how they can begin to recover whenever learning might have been lost during this period,â said Chase Nordengren, a research scientist with the Portland, Ore.,-based education assessment group NWEA.
The amount of learning loss over the past year has not been as significant as researchers anticipated, according to Mr. Nordengren, who credits teachers for doing âextraordinary things with the tools and the circumstances theyâve been given.â