New working paper is believed to be the first to link weaker memory and diminished ‘flexible thinking’ skills to the pandemic’s academic downturn.
This blog was originally published by Greg Toppo on September 18, 2024 on the The 74.
New research may help educators and families zero in on exactly how the COVID-19 pandemic caused such an unprecedented academic slump, suggesting that the culprit lies in something basic and crucial: children’s ability to think, remember and problem-solve.
And here’s a twist: The same core difficulties are bedeviling teachers too.
The findings, contained in a new working paper, are believed to be the first to identify brain changes as an explanation for why students have suffered, both inside and outside the classroom, since the pandemic drove millions out of the classroom.
Nancy Tsai, a Harvard University psychologist who studies the effects of stress on executive functions and who is the study’s lead author, said the new findings offer the first evidence to help us “understand the ‘why’” of the pandemic downturn — “what is actually causing all these issues that we’re seeing and talking about in the news.”
The paper, from the educational assessment and services company“ MindPrint Learning, examines the cognitive skills of students nationwide and finds that, simply put, over the past several years, kids’ famously ever-changing brains have changed for the worse.
Since the pandemic’s onset, students across all ages and economic levels have begun to demonstrate weaker memory and “flexible thinking” skills — those represent the mental bandwidth needed for multitasking, shifting from one activity to another and juggling the day’s demands. But for a few groups, such as younger and lower-income children, the changes have been more profound.
They also show that their teachers’ brains are weaker in almost identical ways, which could help explain high rates of frustration and burnout. They suggest school districts have their work cut out for them if they want to keep their best employees on the payroll and returning to the classroom each fall.
Understanding the ‘why’ of pandemic downturn
The data come from a large, widely-used assessment, the Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery, developed in 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania. It consists of a series of cognitive tasks that measure subjects’ accuracy and speed in several major cognitive domains, including working memory, abstraction, sustained attention, episodic memory and processing speed.
MindPrint has administered the assessment periodically to its clients over the past decade. The most recent rounds totaled 35,000 students and 4,000 teachers in 27 states.