A keystone of education, reading abilities learned in elementary and middle school build foundations crucial not only in school, but in life. Books taught prior to high school like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Outsiders” provide students with greater literacy along with an introduction to American and world cultures. However, with literacy rates declining among elementary and middle school aged children, concern is growing as to how the decrease may affect the younger generation.
A large part of this literacy decline stems from the COVID-19 pandemic. While the nation may be relatively recovered from the immediate effects of the pandemic, its impact on education has resulted in curriculum changes that pose detrimental long term implications for the literacy abilities of the young students. During the pandemic, the adoption of education reliant technology was a necessary substitute for in-person classrooms, however it decreased instruction time as teachers focused on overcoming technological barriers.
“Computer and technology literacy became a requirement and the main focus of all areas of study,” Darlene Dooley, a reading specialist from Vienna Elementary School, said. “Stamina for tasks became diminished as students were more used to using technology and having ‘quick bites’ of learning rather than reading novels for longer periods of time.”
Likely a result of this shift to technology, a study performed by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission analyzed the test scores of Virginia elementary and middle schoolers and found that overall scores in the state were significantly lower following the pandemic. The study reports “fewer first- and second-grade students met early childhood literacy benchmarks in 2021–22 compared with the year before the pandemic.”
Spending critical elementary years in an online classroom has caused students to miss out on important learning benchmarks, difficult to make up for in later grades where students no longer have access to reading specialists or teachers trained in teaching basic reading skills. According to the Long-Term Trend (LTT) Mathematics and Reading Assessments from the Nation’s Report Card, a federal test of the state of US education, reading scores in 2023 among American 13-year-olds were at their lowest in decades, signifying a need for broader, intensive reading instruction beyond elementary school.
Schools are aware of the issue and are taking steps to combat this staggering decline. Many are incorporating phonics into their curriculums in an attempt to instill fundamental linguistic knowledge in students early on. While this system can alleviate the literacy issue at younger grade levels, this does not address the issue in middle schoolers who were between second and fourth grade during the pandemic. These students may struggle to critically think in more rigorous English classes in high school, out of a need to focus on reading comprehension rather than content analysis. Thus, the impacts of the pandemic in the educational sphere will linger for years to come as both teachers and students in all grades work to make up for time lost to COVID-19.