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COVID derailed learning for 1.6 billion students. Here’s how schools can help them catch up

The pandemic is the largest disruption to education in history. But research has identified ways to help children make up lost ground. Will they work in classrooms around the world?
  1. Helen Pearson
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A class of teenage girls wearing face masks and red blazers sit at their desks during a lesson in India

Students in India in March; schools there were closed for months earlier in the pandemic. Credit: Saqib Majeed/SOPA 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.

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Nature 605, 608-611 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01387-7

References

  1. Hattie, J. Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement (Routledge, 2008).

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  2. Education Endowment Foundation. Impact of School Closures on the Attainment Gap: Rapid Evidence Assessment (EEF, 2020).

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  3. Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel. Cost-Effective Approaches to Improve Global Learning (World Bank, 2020).

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  4. Lortie-Forgues, H. & Inglis, M. Educ. Res. 8, 158–166 (2019).

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