Is Pandemic Fallout Still Affecting Assessments?

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

As we enter another winter with health experts predicting a “triple-demic” of flu, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), researchers are learning more about how the pandemic has affected students around the world. Learning loss in reading and mathematics is well documented. But is pandemic fallout affecting your assessments in other ways?

Here’s an overview of the changes many students are experiencing post-pandemic, and how they could still be affecting assessments and evaluations.

Neurodevelopmental Differences

As the brain matures, its cortical thickness decreases. Researchers have recently found that getting older isn’t the only thing that thins the cortex. Adverse events such as family dysfunction and abuse can also trigger cortical thinning.

New studies have looked at cortical thickness among teens who experienced the pandemic. Researchers are noticing the same neurodevelopmental changes in their brains as those that occur with early adversity. Studies show that the hippocampus and amygdala, two structures in the brain associated with memory and emotion regulation, also grew rapidly during the pandemic. In other words, the pandemic seems to have accelerated brain aging in teens.

It isn’t yet clear whether these changes will be long-lasting. It’s also not clear how—or if—these changes will impact assessments going forward. Researchers caution that “if these changes are found to be enduring, accounting for and interpreting data acquired during this period will require additional attention and consideration” (Gotlib et al., 2022).

Social–Emotional Development

For many children, school provides more than academic education. It’s the place where they access

food programs,
emotional support and safety,
opportunities to build friendships, and
education focused on coping and stress-reduction skills.

To find out whether the pandemic affected social–emotional learning (SEL), researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, asked students to rate how strongly they agreed or disagreed with these statements:

I feel confident talking to others.
Other people like me.
I like to share things with others.
I help others when they need help.
I make friends easily.
If I hurt someone, I say sorry.
I am polite towards others (e.g., greetings, saying thank you).

Using data gathered before and after schools closed, researchers found that students scored themselves lower after the pandemic than they had the year before. The effects were worse for students in rural areas and better for those in wealthier families (Bayley et al., 2022).

The findings are aligned with other studies, such as Harvard’s Early Learning Study. In that study, researchers reported that 61% of parents said their child’s social–emotional development was affected by the pandemic (Hanno et al., 2021).

Social–emotional skills have been linked to better learning. For that reason, researchers think the lingering effects are likely to worsen educational inequities linked to gender, age, and income.

SEL skills can affect assessments and evaluations in lots of ways, including these:

Social–emotional skills are included in the diagnostic criteria for some neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and ADHD (CDC, 2022).

When students experience difficulties in SEL, self-confidence and self-esteem can drop, which may affect student performance on a wide range of assessments.

Poorer social–emotional development may affect academic learning and recovery, so performance on cognitive assessments may be affected (Bayley et al., 2022).

Mental Health

Perhaps the most widely reported effect of the pandemic has been the marked rise in anxiety and depression among young people. A recent meta-analysis found that the rates of these internalizing symptoms have doubled since the early days of the pandemic (Racine et al., 2021). Older teens and people assigned female at birth are experiencing worse symptoms, researchers say.

The sharp rise in the risk for mental health problems prompted the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) to recommend that all teens ages 12–18 be screened for major depressive disorder. The USPSTF also recommended that children and teens ages 8–18 years be screened for anxiety (USPSTF, 2022).

As you conduct assessments and evaluations, it’s important to know several things:

High anxiety can lower scores on cognitive and neurocognitive tests, including those used to identify concussion syndrome (Champigny et al., 2020) and learning disabilities (Schulze et al., 2022).
Social anxiety, in particular, can disrupt the ability to concentrate and reduce academic achievement (Leigh et al., 2021).
Anxiety can interfere with executive function, a group of skills that includes working memory; the ability to plan, organize, and shift efficiently from task to task; and emotion regulation (Ursache & Raver, 2014). People with ADHD and learning disabilities such as dyslexia often have differences in executive function (Crisci et al., 2021).
Depression is associated with changes in some cognitive abilities, such as processing speed and concentration (Wang et al., 2019). Both abilities could impact a student’s performance on a range of assessments.
Depression can also lower self-esteem and can lead students to think they have less cognitive ability than they actually do (Srisurapanont et al., 2017).

As clinicians, educators, and families address learning loss, evaluate health conditions, and plan services for students, part of the work will be acknowledging the changes the pandemic has brought about for all of us. We’ll need more research, more awareness, and more compassion moving forward.