Remote Learning During COVID Still Affecting Student Learning

By Michael Gold

The COVID-19 pandemic may have receded (and let’s hope it’s exiting for good), but it’s continuing to leave its mark on children’s education.

Students in general are suffering from deficits as a result of closed schools and partial attendance policies in 2020 and 2021, in mathematics, reading and speech, despite using remote learning systems. Students living in poverty experienced even greater learning gaps. Special education students are struggling as well due to extended COVID-19 school closures.

Student test scores in grades 3-8, in reading and math were “significantly lower” during the 2021-22 school year, “compared to a pre-pandemic year,” reports NWEA (formerly the Northwest Evaluation Association), a nonprofit education research organization.

“The disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted students’ academic achievement in unprecedented ways,” NWEA stated. “Students who started in the bottom decile (bottom 10 percent) experienced larger initial impacts of the pandemic during 2020-21 and less improvement during 2021-22.”

Natalie DiPaolo has seen the students struggling. As the director of the Sylvan Center, a tutoring facility in Pleasantville, DiPaolo pointed out where the gaps are greatest, such as phonics, speech and math.

“We’re getting people from all over – from Pleasantville, Armonk, Chappaqua, Thornwood, Ossining, Mount Kisco, Tarrytown and Valhalla,” DiPaolo said. “We had a family from the Bronx and even one from Georgia.”

“Kids went a whole year without phonics and speech services. We had an eight-year-old who wasn’t reading,” DiPaolo explained.

Many students wrestled with basic phonics rules.

“If you don’t understand vowel sounds or consonant blends, it becomes a problem with the reading as a result of just being home,” she said. “A lot of kids have learning deficits who were in pre-k and kindergarten during 2020 and 2021. They are second- or third-graders today.”

She has also seen a number of children who needed speech services.

“Their speech issues weren’t identified because they were at home,” DiPaolo said.

Students with learning disabilities didn’t get tested for services either for the same reason.

Also, “math has become a problem at every single level,” DiPaolo said. “The basic skills to do algebra or trigonometry are not there.”

Even students coming to Sylvan for SAT preparation have issues, she pointed out. “They never got those analytical skills in reading and math.”

Students asked to compare and contrast two written passages, discern the author’s purpose, make inferences, find implicit meaning in any given piece of writing, tease out the author’s feelings about the subject and clearly state the author’s conclusion need remedial tutoring because the students missed in-person learning.

It’s clear that remote learning is no substitute for a student working with a teacher face to face.

It’s easier to keep the attention of children in a classroom, particularly the younger ones, DiPaolo noted.

“They can look at the teachers’ lips and see and hear the words properly,” she said. “You can hear a child reading.”

“My heart really goes out to these teachers. They did an amazing job (during the pandemic),” said DiPaolo, who was raised in Mount Vernon and worked as a teacher for 23 years, mostly in Yonkers. But “if a school was closed during 2020-2021, it was more likely that a child would suffer a deficit.”

Working online, the students were often home alone while their parents were at work, which led in many cases to mental health issues.

“My conjecture is that with kids isolated like this, there is a depression that comes with that,” DiPaolo said.

To help parents, DiPaolo recommends they work closely with their child’s teachers. Ask the teacher what they’re working on in the classroom.

“If a child is not doing their homework, why are they not doing it?” she said. “Does she not understand? If the child doesn’t know how to do the work, does she not comprehend it?”

If a student is struggling, parents can ask the school to perform diagnostic testing, to see if the child requires services, including speech and reading.

Also, extremely important for younger children, DiPaolo said, “Read with your child. That’s where they pick up the joy of reading.”

Reading with your son or daughter helps build their vocabulary and comprehension and reinforces their phonics skills.

“Ask questions. What happened in the story?” DiPaolo said.

One good strategy is to “read a paragraph or a sentence, and the child reads the next one.”

For math, parents can work with their child shopping in the supermarket, the doctor’s office or even at the amusement park.

“Ask how much each item costs. Ask them to count the items in the shopping cart. At the doctor, ask, ‘How many people are ahead of us (to see the doctor)?’ Ask them to count the number of people in line at the amusement park,” DiPaolo said.

“There are lots of little things we can do with our kids.”

Pleasantville-based writer Michael Gold has had articles published in the New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union, The Virginian-Pilot, The Palm Beach Post, other newspapers, and The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary journal.