Data presented at a Montgomery County Board of Education meeting revealed that virtual learning has had an overwhelmingly negative effect on MCPS students’ literacy and math proficiency. Compared to previous years, overall literacy and math proficiency rates plummeted in key transition years: second grade, fifth grade and eleventh grade.
Overall literacy readiness in second grade dropped 35.3%; in fifth grade, it dropped 23.5%, while eighth grade dropped 10.8% and juniors dropped 9.2%. Overall math readiness also had a sharp decline with second grade dropping 20.6%, fifth and eighth grade dropping 25.8%, and juniors dropping 2.3%, according to the data from the BoE meeting.
“It is clear that the pandemic has resulted in a significant learning disruption over the past eighteen months,” interim MCPS superintendent Dr. Monifa B. Mcknight said in a BoE meeting on Sept. 21, 2021.
“I think it’s a mix of not having the interaction with both the teacher and the students. Next, I had a student describe to me that it felt like the school was going on 24/7 because the laptop was their classroom so as soon as they closed it they still had it on them which can feel very overwhelming,” Seneca Valley High School English teacher Pablo Ramirez Uribe said.
Many students are not surprised by the drop in proficiency. “In history and English I was revising a few papers for my classmates, and I don’t think that there had been much improvement, if any, from papers before COVID. I believe that it was because of virtual learning,”Cabin John Middle School eighth-grader Alvin Wang said.
Mr. Uribe also expressed that the fundamental difference in subject content may have contributed to the plummet in proficiency. “I just think that in a lot of ways like math, which is the one that has seen the worst drop compared to literacy, requires so much constant help and making sense of these very abstract concepts, that not having a way to make abstract things concrete explains why, especially with the developing brain, if it misses a year of reinforcement material it will be like they never learned that in the first place,” Uribe said.
However, Seneca Valley High School sophomore Kamran Ashraf said it was not too difficult for him to adjust to virtual learning, but that some of his peers had a harder time. For example, Poolesville High School freshman Olivia Ding said that going back in person affected her grades more than she expected. She also stated the negative effects of this on her mental health with the number of assignments, class tests and standardized testing.
Many students believe that reteaching some essential skills that they may not have mastered last year and adjusting the pace of the class could be helpful in boosting proficiency rates.
Article written by Elise Liu of Seneca Valley High School
Photo by May Pham of Walter Johnson High School