The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Disruptions to Preschool Children’s Cognitive, Social-Emotional, and Executive Functioning Skills

Oct 15, 2026

Longitudinal analysis compares kindergarten readiness for children whose preschool experiences were interrupted by COVID-19-related preschool closures with readiness for prepandemic children whose experiences were more typical. Results show pandemic-related disadvantages for early math, social-emotional skills, and executive functioning, with deficits of about 11–18 percentage points. Disadvantages emerge across income levels, and patterns suggest differential effects for lower- and higher-income groups’ social-emotional and executive functioning, though not always statistically significant. Policy implications are discussed.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryHealthcare

FormatPDF

Pages15

Reading Time38 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Early pandemic school closures and learning lag concerns

Equity and access factors across income and households

Remote learning debates and support challenges

Participation effects and knowledge gaps

AERA Open January-December 2025, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 1–15 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584251330165 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2025. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Disruptions to Preschool Children’s Cognitive, Social-Emotional, and Executive Functioning Skills Vi-Nhuan Le NORC at the University of Chicago Diana Schaack University of Colorado, Denver Cristal Cisneros Denver Preschool Program Jolene Gregory Denver Public Schools Using a longitudinal design that analyzed data captured before and after pandemic-related preschool closures, we compared the kindergarten readiness of children whose preschool experiences were interrupted by the pandemic with the kindergarten readiness of prepandemic children whose preschool experiences were more typical. Pandemic-related disadvantages were observed for early math, social-emotional, and executive functioning, with the pandemic-affected cohort showing disadvantages of between 11 and 18 percentage points. Developmental disadvantages were observed across all income levels, and there was suggestive evidence that the loss of preschool affected the social-emotional and executive functioning skills of children from lower-and higher-income groups differently, although these differences were not always statistically significant. Policy implications are discussed. Keywords: early childhood, achievement gap, achievement, regression analyses, pandemic, achievement, social-emotional learning, executive functioning, preschool Introduction One of the most troubling aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic was its disruption to schools. Through a shelter-inplace decree, nearly every U.S. jurisdiction ordered or recommended the closing of schools by March 29, 2020 (EmpowerK12, 2020), which meant that students spent nearly one third of the 2019–20 academic year at home. Atthe outset of the school closures, educators were worried that teachers’ and students’ lack of experience with remote instruction would lead to a developmental disadvantage or learning lag (Dorn et al., 2021), which is defined as developmental or academic progress that is slower than that demonstrated by earlier cohorts of students who were not affected by the pandemic (Pier et al., 2021) . Policymakers were particularly anxious that achievement declines would be most severe for children residing in lower-income households because they tend to have inadequate physical learning space within the home (Johnson et al., 2023) and poorer access to technological infrastructure (Haderlein et al., 2021) . Early childhood educators and advocates also were particularly apprehensive about the potential effects of pandemic-related school closures on preschool-aged children (Weisenfeld, 2021) . Because early childhood is considered a sensitive period in children’s development in which failure to learn basic skills makes it harder to learn those skills in the future (Black et al., 2017), early childhood educatorsand advocates were worried about the compounding effects that preschool closures might have for young children’s learning. They noted that given this sensitive period, learning lag in early childhood might have more longer-term consequences than learning lag at other grade levels along the education continuum (Kaffenberger, 2021; Uğraş et al., 2023). In addition, many public preschool programs, which Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages

FAQs

How does the study compare children affected by preschool closures with those not affected?

It uses a longitudinal design analyzing data captured before and after pandemic-related preschool closures, comparing kindergarten readiness across disrupted and prepandemic groups.

What learning and development areas showed pandemic-related disadvantages?

The study reports disadvantages for early math, social-emotional skills, and executive functioning, with deficits between 11 and 18 percentage points.

Do the disadvantages differ across income levels?

Developmental disadvantages appear across all income levels, with suggestive evidence that social-emotional and executive functioning impacts may differ between lower- and higher-income groups, though differences are not always statistically significant.

Oct 15, 2026

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