By October last year, Meg Brydon could see the terrible toll the pandemic had taken on children at her school. Brydon was a teacher at Ashwood High School, in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia — the city that has spent more time in COVID-19 lockdowns than any other in the world. The school had been closed, on and off, for about seven months.
Before the pandemic, around 10% of children who joined Ashwood at the age of 12 would be below the expected national standard. But in the latest cohort, Brydon could see that a shocking 30% of them were behind. And the damage ran even deeper. So many children had behavioural or psychological problems after lockdowns that some were getting violent, and the school hired a full-time psychologist to help. “The number of referrals to her was astronomical,” Brydon says.
Similar scenarios have played out in classrooms around the world. By February this year, schools globally had been closed because of COVID-19 for an average of 4.5 months, affecting an estimated 1.6 billion students and creating what the United Nations has called the largest disruption to education in history. Even 2 years into the pandemic, 48 countries had not yet fully reopened their schools, according to the UN cultural organization UNESCO.
The consequences of these closures follow a sad but predictable course. In rich countries, disadvantaged and vulnerable children have fallen behind the most. Those in poorer countries have been the hardest hit, and millions will never go back to school at all. UNESCO estimates that today’s generation of students could lose US$17 trillion in lifetime earnings at current values because of missed learning and skills. “We’re really talking about a generational loss,” says Margarete Sachs-Israel, who leads the Inclusive Quality Education Section at UNESCO in Bangkok.
Now, governments and schools need to know the best approach to help children catch up — and research could show the way. Over the past 20–30 years, researchers in education, economics and international development have built substantial bodies of evidence, including banks of randomized controlled trials, showing strategies that are effective at boosting school attendance and learning. They reveal, for example, that tutoring is one of the most cost-effective ways to help children to make up lost ground. And some countries are drawing on this evidence in their COVID-19 responses, putting a focus on tutoring and other programmes that educational studies have shown to be effective.
But experts point to a number of concerns. The true extent of learning losses in the pandemic is not yet clear; educational research rarely provides simple answers about what to do; and nations might not use this opportunity to make much-needed systemic change. “Every single time there’s been a calamity in the world, we’ve rushed back to the old normal fast,” says John Hattie, an educational researcher at the University of Melbourne. “The biggest travesty of COVID is if we learn nothing.”
What’s more, the scale of the task ahead is immense. Researchers and education experts are concerned that the amounts being invested are laughably insufficient, given the number of students who need help. “It’s a real test for the global community,” says Kenneth Russell, an education specialist at the UN children’s charity UNICEF in New York. “And I don’t think the magnitude of the response matches the magnitude of the need.”
Even so, the pandemic could eventually drive some transformative changes in education — ones that both improve practices and reach more students, researchers say. “I do think it has thrown into the air many of the assumptions that we make about education,” says Lee Elliot Major, who studies social mobility at the University of Exeter, UK.
Tough sell
The concept of using research in education has been a long, tough sell. “The fundamental issue is that many practitioners do not believe it will ever be a science,” says Andreas Schleicher, who heads the directorate for education and skills at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. Teachers are not expected to browse academic journals, and educational policies are often set by the ideology of bureaucrats rather than by research showing what actually works. “Many of them use evidence to confirm what they want to do,” Schleicher says.
Some researchers and educators have been trying to change that view for decades. They want education to operate more like medicine, where a drug typically has to be proven effective in randomized controlled trials before it’s used. Advocates of evidence-informed education argue that teaching and learning methods should also be shown to work by research — rather than being used because of tradition, opinion or the latest fad. But they acknowledge that testing whether a method improves educational outcomes is often more complex than testing whether a drug improves health.
Images/LightRocket/Getty
By October last year, Meg Brydon could see the terrible toll the pandemic had taken on children at her school. Brydon was a teacher at Ashwood High School, in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia — the city that has spent more time in COVID-19 lockdowns than any other in the world. The school had been closed, on and off, for about seven months.
Before the pandemic, around 10% of children who joined Ashwood at the age of 12 would be below the expected national standard. But in the latest cohort, Brydon could see that a shocking 30% of them were behind. And the damage ran even deeper. So many children had behavioural or psychological problems after lockdowns that some were getting violent, and the school hired a full-time psychologist to help. “The number of referrals to her was astronomical,” Brydon says.
Similar scenarios have played out in classrooms around the world. By February this year, schools globally had been closed because of COVID-19 for an average of 4.5 months, affecting an estimated 1.6 billion students and creating what the United Nations has called the largest disruption to education in history. Even 2 years into the pandemic, 48 countries had not yet fully reopened their schools, according to the UN cultural organization UNESCO.
The consequences of these closures follow a sad but predictable course. In rich countries, disadvantaged and vulnerable children have fallen behind the most. Those in poorer countries have been the hardest hit, and millions will never go back to school at all. UNESCO estimates that today’s generation of students could lose US$17 trillion in lifetime earnings at current values because of missed learning and skills. “We’re really talking about a generational loss,” says Margarete Sachs-Israel, who leads the Inclusive Quality Education Section at UNESCO in Bangkok.
Now, governments and schools need to know the best approach to help children catch up — and research could show the way. Over the past 20–30 years, researchers in education, economics and international development have built substantial bodies of evidence, including banks of randomized controlled trials, showing strategies that are effective at boosting school attendance and learning. They reveal, for example, that tutoring is one of the most cost-effective ways to help children to make up lost ground. And some countries are drawing on this evidence in their COVID-19 responses, putting a focus on tutoring and other programmes that educational studies have shown to be effective.
The COVID generation: how is the pandemic affecting kids’ brains?
But experts point to a number of concerns. The true extent of learning losses in the pandemic is not yet clear; educational research rarely provides simple answers about what to do; and nations might not use this opportunity to make much-needed systemic change. “Every single time there’s been a calamity in the world, we’ve rushed back to the old normal fast,” says John Hattie, an educational researcher at the University of Melbourne. “The biggest travesty of COVID is if we learn nothing.”
What’s more, the scale of the task ahead is immense. Researchers and education experts are concerned that the amounts being invested are laughably insufficient, given the number of students who need help. “It’s a real test for the global community,” says Kenneth Russell, an education specialist at the UN children’s charity UNICEF in New York. “And I don’t think the magnitude of the response matches the magnitude of the need.”
Even so, the pandemic could eventually drive some transformative changes in education — ones that both improve practices and reach more students, researchers say. “I do think it has thrown into the air many of the assumptions that we make about education,” says Lee Elliot Major, who studies social mobility at the University of Exeter, UK.
Tough sell
The concept of using research in education has been a long, tough sell. “The fundamental issue is that many practitioners do not believe it will ever be a science,” says Andreas Schleicher, who heads the directorate for education and skills at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. Teachers are not expected to browse academic journals, and educational policies are often set by the ideology of bureaucrats rather than by research showing what actually works. “Many of them use evidence to confirm what they want to do,” Schleicher says.
Some researchers and educators have been trying to change that view for decades. They want education to operate more like medicine, where a drug typically has to be proven effective in randomized controlled trials before it’s used. Advocates of evidence-informed education argue that teaching and learning methods should also be shown to work by research — rather than being used because of tradition, opinion or the latest fad. But they acknowledge that testing whether a method improves educational outcomes is often more complex than testing whether a drug improves health.
An instructor wearing PPE teaches a student through a plastic barrier in a cubicle at an education centre in Japan
A student in Tokyo receives one-to-one tutoring through a transparent barrier in August 2020.Credit: Toru Hanai/Bloomberg/Getty
In late 2010, evidence-informed education got one of its biggest boosts when the UK government invested £125 million (US$156 million) to raise standards in schools. This gave rise to the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), a non-profit organization in London that has since become a leader in educational research. It has funded at least 160 randomized controlled trials in education, probably more than any other organization in the world. Around half of English schools have taken part in these trials. The investment in the EEF “had a ripple effect around the world”, says Annette Boaz, who studies evidence and policy at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Other databases of educational research have flowered, too. Hattie led an early, pioneering project to synthesize evidence from around the globe on what influences learning1. And, the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences in Washington DC maintains the What Works Clearinghouse, a source of information on educational programmes that have been shown to be effective through rigorous research. Hattie argues that with databases such as these, the field doesn’t need more evidence — the challenge lies in getting the information used by governments and schools. “We’re hopeless at that,” he says.
The pandemic could, in theory, help to bridge that gap. Countries worldwide want to know the best way to invest in educational recovery, and billions of dollars are already pouring into schools. “This moment in time really is a unique one, for changing the conversation about evidence in education,” says Nancy Madden, a psychologist and researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Education in Baltimore, Maryland. “People want something that works, they aren’t just doing business as usual.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.