Addressing Unfinished Learning in Middle School Math through Tailored Acceleration

As districts prepare their reopening plans, they’ll confront a vexing challenge that predates the coronavirus. Summer learning loss has knocked students off track for decades. But the school closures resulting from COVID-19 have unquestionably deepened and universalized this problem. Because of COVID-19 learning loss, NWEA researchers project that students will resume math with less than 50 percent of learning gains and, in some grades, nearly a full year behind compared to previous years.

In response, there will be new expectations from parents, community leaders, and senior administrators for schools to articulate a plan to help students. It’s an enormously challenging moment, but it’s also an opportunity for schools to comprehensively address learning loss, both COVID-19 and pre-COVID-19-related.

The New Classrooms team covers this topic in depth in a new report published this month. The report, Solving The Iceberg Problem: Addressing Learning Loss in Middle School Math through Tailored Acceleration, outlines how education leaders and teachers can address significant student learning loss in middle-school math.

We recommend an approach called tailored acceleration which focuses on meeting students from where they are and then accelerating their learning to college and career readiness over a period of one or more years.

Read the full Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) blog post here.