Progress toward pandemic recovery - Continued signs of rebounding achievement at the start of the 2022–23 school year - December 2022

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Rhys

NWEA analyzed MAP Growth reading and math results from nearly 7 million students in grades 3–8 across about 25,000 public schools to assess progress at the start of the 2022–23 school year. Evidence shows students lost less ground during summer 2022 than in typical patterns, and academic rebounding continued in fall 2022, though it remained uneven across grades and summers. The youngest cohort had the largest reading gap and least rebounding, and full recovery is projected to take several more years.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages9

Reading Time23 min

AccessFree to download

Key Findings

Pandemic impact and study approach

Summer 2022 learning changes

Summer slide comparison (2019 vs 2022)

Achievement gap trends across 2022–23 start

Longitudinal cohorts and time points (spring 2021 to fall 2022)

CENTER FOR SCHOOL AND STUDENT PROGRESS BRIEF Progress toward pandemic recovery: Continued signs of rebounding achievement at the start of the 2022–23 school year December 2022 Karyn Lewis and Megan Kuhfeld KEY FINDINGS • Students lost less ground over summer 2022 compared to prepandemic trends. • Academic rebounding in reading and math continued in fall 2022; however, rebounding is not even across school years and summers, especially in reading. • The youngest students in the sample (current third-graders who were kindergarteners when the pandemic began) have the largest reading achievement gap and showed the least rebounding. • Even with continued rebounding, student achievement remains lower than in a typical year and full recovery is likely still several years away. This brief continues NWEA’s ongoing research agenda examining how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected student achievement in reading and math. Our prior researchi, ii, iii shows that the impact of the pandemic on student achievement steadily accumulated over the course of the 2020–21 school year and hit the low point in spring of 2021 (i. e. , this is the term when we generally observed the largest magnitude of gaps between test scores during the pandemic relative to historical trends) . Over the course of the 2021–22 school year, achievement gains started to mirror prepandemic trends, and because of this rebounding,1 the gap between midpandemic achievement relative to a typical year started to narrow, albeit modestly. iii Here, we examine whether we continue to see signs of improvement at the start of the 2022–23 school year and how learning patterns across the summer of 2022 contribute to continued rebounding. To do this, we examine test score data from nearly 7 million students in grades 3–8 who took MAP® Growth™ assessments in reading and math in approximately 25,000 public schools between 2020–21 and fall 2022 (“COVID sample”) and compared these data to a roughly comparable sample of students who tested between 2017–18 and fall 2019 (“preCOVID sample”) . Students lost less ground in summer 2022 compared to historical patterns During the summer months, students typically tend to lose some of the gains they make during the school year (i. e. ,“summer slide” phenomenoniv, v) . To understand the magnitude of slide during summer 2022 relative to typical trends, we calculated change in test scores between spring 2022 and fall 2022 and compared this to the change in test scores in the prepandemic summer of 2019.2 Figure 1 depicts the change in scores in reading and math over these two summers (expressed in standard deviation units) separately for elementary and middle school students. Although we found that scores did decline on average during summer 2022, Figure 1 shows that declines were smaller than a typical summer (i. e. , the darker bars are shorter than the lighter bars) . Trends in both years are consistent with prior research that shows summer slide is typically more extreme in math than reading and in younger students compared to older students.vii ¹ We define rebounding as patterns of achievement gains that mirror or exceed prepandemic trends .“Rebounding” is not interchangeable with "recovery"; rather, the former describes progress toward the latter. We use the term achievement gap to indicate the difference between the COVID and pre-COVID samples in a grade level (reported here as standardized differences in average test scores) . 2 We estimated the rates of summer learning using a growth model that accounts for time before/after testing in the spring and fall. See the technical appendixvi for more details on the model. CENTER FOR SCHOOL AND STUDENT PROGRESS Achievement at the start of the 2022–2023 school year | 2 Figure 1: Test score declines during the summer in 2019 and 2022 for reading (left panel) and math (right panel) separately by grade level Note. Summer drops are reported as the total score change

FAQs

What does the brief report about student progress toward pandemic recovery in early 2022–23?

It finds continued rebounding in reading and math in fall 2022, with signs that students lost less ground over summer 2022 than historical pre-pandemic patterns.

How did summer 2022 learning compare with a typical year?

Test-score declines occurred during summer 2022, but the declines were smaller than a typical summer, with patterns consistent with prior findings about math declining more than reading and younger students declining more than older students.

Which group showed the weakest reading progress?

The youngest students in the sample, current third-graders who were kindergarteners when the pandemic began, had the largest reading achievement gap and showed the least rebounding.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Rhys