In this episode of The EduJedi Report Podcast, Learning Counsel CEO Leilani Cauthen discusses recent findings by researchers Dr. John Bielinski and Dr. Kyle Wagner at Illuminate Education on the effect quarantines and remote learning have had on K-8 learning outcomes.  According to Cauthen, “Schools working through remote learning transitions have focused on engagement, but the data indicates that there is a clear hierarchy of needs and educators will need the tools to pinpoint risk quickly and make a recovery plan.”

“If kids forget things over time, if they’ve been out of school for a long period of time, then there’s a loss of instruction,” said John Bielinski, Senior Director of Research and Development, Illuminate Education. “So we said, we’ve got a lot of good data in reading and mathematics for K through eight, and we can start looking at that data and using that information to project where we think kids will be this fall on each of the grades, in reading and math. So, we used the data that we had, looking at cohorts of kids from kindergarten through grade five, to determine how much loss we would expect to see using summer learning loss as the original basis. Then we took what we know from our growth data, and we projected back from a particular date to say, at this point in time, where are kids at and where will kids be at the beginning of the school year in the fall? And then we can use that information, that gap, that difference to estimate how much loss will have occurred.”

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