Don A. Klinger Professor

The global pandemic has created undeniable hardships for school-aged children, teachers, and parents around the world. Understandably, governments and policymakers are concerned about the impact of COVID-19 on student learning and achievement. This concern is mirrored in the emerging research, which has used large-scale assessment measures to attempt to quantify the degree of ‘learning losses’ that students have experienced as a result of school closures, shifts towards online and hybrid learning, and other impacts associated with successive waves of this deadly virus. Not surprisingly, this body of research suggests that learning stalled during the pandemic, with the greatest impacts felt by at-risk student populations, such as those with lower socio-economic status (SES) and migrant backgrounds (see Engzell et al., 2021; Kaffenberger, 2021; Maldonato & De Witte, 2021).

Discussions of student progress, or lack thereof, have also been examined alongside the construct of academic resilience. While defined in numerous ways, academic resilience is typically considered to be present in those children who obtain positive achievement outcomes despite being disadvantaged due to factors such as lower SES or facing adversity. As one example, for the purposes of cross-national comparisons, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines disadvantaged youth as those in the lowest one-third of its socioeconomic indicator within each country, based on information about parents’ occupation(s) and along with measures of household possessions (OECD, 2018a). Countries which possess smaller achievement gaps between high and low-SES student populations are said to be more equitable and also more successful in promoting academic resilience (Agasisti, et al., 2018).

The global pandemic has created undeniable hardships for school-aged children, teachers, and parents around the world. Understandably, governments and policymakers are concerned about the impact of COVID-19 on student learning and achievement. This concern is mirrored in the emerging research, which has used large-scale assessment measures to attempt to quantify the degree of ‘learning losses’ that students have experienced as a result of school closures, shifts towards online and hybrid learning, and other impacts associated with successive waves of this deadly virus. Not surprisingly, this body of research suggests that learning stalled during the pandemic, with the greatest impacts felt by at-risk student populations, such as those with lower socio-economic status (SES) and migrant backgrounds (see Engzell et al., 2021; Kaffenberger, 2021; Maldonato & De Witte, 2021)...