Conference Program

This paper examines the emergent international research to provide an overview of the impact of
the pandemic on primary and secondary pupils’ learning losses across the globe (see De Witte &
François, 2023; Engzell et al., 2021; Khan & Ahmed, 2021; Molato-Gayares et al., 2022). The
authors outline the types of evidence that currently exist, and the strengths and limitations of the
evidence used to enact COVID-19 related education policies. Examples of subsequent and
prominent education policies that have been adopted to address these learning losses will be
critiqued, particularly those related to address lower socioeconomically disadvantaged student
populations. The paper argues that the pandemic provides an illustration of the educational
impacts of unexpected, devastating events that suddenly change the learning environment, and
the differential impacts of these sudden changes on vulnerable student populations. Overall, the
chief objective of the presentation is to promote greater understanding of the relationship
between student achievement and the varying success of education policies that have been
adopted to address learning losses.

This four-nation policy comparison paper draws attention to what happened to school reform and teacher education immediately prior to the global pandemic and just after it occurred. The paper will illustrate in small and large-grained ways how nearly overnight the COVID-19 pandemic caused schools in 188 countries to close – with a comparative analysis in four featured nations of Canada, the USA, Portugal, and Brazil. Almost instantaneously, distance learning became the preferred mode of instruction (OECD, 2020a, b, c). Yet, despite the pandemic being universal, teachers and students in each country did not experience it in the same way. Those who already were at a disadvantage (i.e., lack of technology, influence of poverty, underserved school contexts, etc.) experienced even deeper effects. This was an undercurrent felt in all four featured nations. What some perceived as a single pandemic was described by others as four pandemics involving (1) health care, (2) economics, (3) climate, and (4) educational disparities (LadsonBillings, Equity Excell Educ 54(1):68–78, 2021). This paper will draw on empirical comparative qualitative studies from 2019 to 2023 (Craig, C., Flores, M.A., Marcondes, M., & Ciuffetelli Parker, D., 2020; Craig, C., Flores, M.A., Marcondes, M., & Ciuffetelli Parker, D., 2023; Flores, M.A., Craig, C., Ciuffetelli Parker, D., Marcondes, M.,In Press).

This study examined the confluence of popular media stories and political rhetoric stemming from the most recent release of the Programme in International Student Assessment 2022 results in Italy and Canada. Both countries have traditionally exemplified significant regional achievement differences, which in turn spark intense debate on the effectiveness of education policy reforms (see Checchi & Verzillo, 2018; Giancola & Salmier, 2022; Volante & Mattei, 2024). Using a qualitative content analysis, we examined popular media stories related to release of PISA results in the largest news outlets across these national contexts. We considered the twelve most popular national newspapers, based on circulation statistics, to represent Italy and Canada. Our comparative analysis examined interpretive ‘policy signals’ offered in relation to achievement results, along with the rigour of accompanying evidence-based policy discourses and proposed actions.

Although cross-national studies have suggested significant learning losses are associated with the pandemic (De Witte & François, 2023; Khan & Ahmed, 2021; Molato-Gayares, et al., 2022; Schnepf et al., in press), results from the Programme in International Student Assessment (PISA) provide an important opportunity to examine this critical issue using a widely recognized international benchmark measure. This paper juxtaposed PISA 2022 results against previous test administrations to evaluate the effects of school closures on cognitive learning outcomes across Canada, United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union. Our analysis revealed that students in the 2022 PISA cohort encountered a substantial 13-point decline in mathematics, amounting to 70% of a typical school year. The reading test followed in importance, exhibiting a decline equivalent to 30% of a school year. Conversely, the science test showed the least impact from the pandemic, experiencing only a marginal 0.5-point decrease. When considering gender, females displayed more pronounced losses across all evaluated subjects. Examining socioeconomic status, students in the top quartile (upper 25%) encountered a mere 4-point drop in mathematics, while those in the lowest quartile faced an 18-point decrease, signifying a disparity of roughly 70% of a school year. In the reading test, both quartiles experienced negative effects, differing by approximately 5 points. In science, a significant gap of around 14 points was noted between the two quartiles. Particularly in Australia and New Zealand, substantial variations in socioeconomic backgrounds were evident in mathematics and science test results. Our findings are discussed in relation to cross-national trends and education policies that maximise the recovery of learning for disadvantaged student groups.

This paper analyses the extent of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy on educational learning. It examines the effects generated by school closures, distance learning and discontinuity and disruption of in-person schooling, as well as the (few) remedies that have been identified, based on national policy interventions, to mitigate and/or recover accumulated learning loss. After a review of the literature and isituational documentation, in the paper we use data from the learning assessments through tests conducted by INVALSI for the second, fifth, eighth and tenth years of schooling (for the years 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023). In the first school year impacted by the pandemic, Italian schools were closed for a lengthy period and the return to normality in the following years was very inconsistent, with marked differences between regions, sub-regional areas, and grades. In line with several other studies on the topic, our analysis shows that the learning loss, although not entirely attributable to the pandemic’s disruption of normal schooling, was quite significant for Italian students, especially those in upper secondary schools, probably because these grades adopted a scheme of rotating student groups between in-person and distance learning during the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years. In all grades, the learning loss was more intense and severe for mathematics than for reading proficiency. As in many other European countries, learning loss has exacerbated educational inequalities among students based on socio-economic and cultural conditions. Additionally, since in Italy differences in students’ family backgrounds are reflected in a differing socio-economic and cultural composition of the different tracks of upper secondary school, learning losses were more severe for students at technical and vocational schools than those studying at scientific and general schools designed to prepare students for tertiary education. In examining these results, this chapter also addresses the fact that the results of national programmes aimed at recovering learning loss have not been evaluated; moreover, there have been few such programmes and they have mainly entailed the allocation of economic resources that schools can use as they see fit to improve educational results.

The paper relies on the consideration that the debate on educational processes that developed during the Covid-19 emergency focused almost solely on the role of schools and formal educational agencies, paying little attention to the multiple educational opportunities of which children, adolescents, young people and families have been deprived during the Pandemic time.

Yet the pandemic revealed the need to focus on the times, opportunities, spaces and actors of no schooling which strongly re-emerged during that phase, thus inviting to take into serious account the challenge of the co-operation between the formal, non-formal and informal dimensions of educational processes, also as occasions for contrasting the “learning losses” associated with school closures.

The paper is based on an exploratory analysis of the scientific and public debate on the issues of schooling and education emerged since the very beginning of the pandemic, which reveals the need to re-evaluate the contribution of the no schooling within the more general education processes of younger generation.

In this perspective, beyond the everyday urgency, the Pandemic becomes a challenge also useful to rethink the co-operation between formal, no-formal and informal education and to “start again” from the movements and experiences that since the early XX Century have highlighted, despite so many difficulties, the possibility of integrating the educational processes that occur into places and spaces other than the formal and traditional ones.

Moving from this analysis, the paper final aim is to consider this dramatic but extraordinary opportunity as an occasion to outline the contours of a new time for education - richer, heterogeneous, and polycentric – able to put at the core the idea of a “continuum” in education.