Two UW–Madison doctoral students with the School of Education’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis had their research highlighted in a recent report by Education Week.
Narek Sahakyan, who is also a researcher at WIDA within the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, and Glenn Poole, a project assistant at WIDA, earlier this year published their study titled, “Examining English Learner Testing, Proficiency, and Growth: Before, During, and ‘After’ the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
Education Week looks at this research within the context of post-pandemic education, and how language-proficiency scores are struggling to rise in the aftermath of the pandemic.
“Some people may think that the pandemic is done,” Sahakyan tells Education Week. “But the impact that it has had nationally on the educational system, and specifically on the most vulnerable groups and how they are serviced, funded, and resourced — that is definitely still reverberating throughout the educational system.”
The report was published to show the impact of the pandemic on multilingual learners’ overall English proficiency and language development. Sahakyan and Poole find that “for students tested ‘during COVID-19,’ overall composite scores were lower than in the two years prior to the start of the pandemic.”
They continue: “The largest declines ‘during COVID-19’ were in productive skills (speaking and writing) for early elementary school students, and in oral skills (speaking and listening) for elementary and late elementary school students. Average growth in the writing domain, meanwhile, has increased at all grade levels and even exceeded pre-pandemic growth for middle and high school students, though average writing scale scores still lag somewhat behind pre-pandemic averages.”
In Education Week, Sahakyan states, “doing similar analyses, and then comparing to the national trends, in my opinion, is going to be very informative, both at the state and the district levels for policymakers, and for administrators to understand where they stand.”
Poole adds: “We know that multilingual learners already had to overcome many barriers in terms of access to course content and opportunities to learn, so this study isn’t just about how scores went down in a particular year — we have to think about the long-term consequences of what these declines will mean. Will these students be able to complete the coursework they need to graduate?”
For upcoming research on the topic, Sahakyan’s dissertation research will focus on examining English learner disparities in educational outcomes and assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these disparities. Poole’s dissertation investigates the impact of teacher turnover on opportunity gaps for English learners.
Read the full article in Education Week.