Proceedings of The 7th International Academic Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2022
DOI:
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COVID-19, Academic Resilience, and Global Policy Responses
Louis Volante
ABSTRACT:
In every industrialised country, COVID-19 led to school closures for successive weeks with instruction shifted online to help reduce the risk of transmission and keep students safe. Understandably, parents, educators, and policymakers around the world are concerned about the negative impact associated with the loss of face-to-face instruction and social isolation measures.
For the most part, researchers have begun to tackle this timely issue by examining the “learning losses” associated with school closures. Simply put, learning loss research attempts to quantify, using large-scale student assessment results, the degree of progress, or lack thereof, in core subject areas such as reading, mathematics, and/or science that have resulted from interruptions to in-person schooling. Often this research suggests that learning has stalled during the pandemic, and that at-risk student populations, such as those from lower socio-economic backgrounds or migrant families have been disproportionately impacted. Yet, it is equally clear that the unpreceded hardships associated with COVID-19 and school closures can not be captured solely by traditional standardized test score patterns. The latter is evidenced by the troubling physical and mental health trends that have emerged. Collectively, recent physical and mental health data underscore the multifaceted nature of the challenges students are facing and the need for broader notions of academic resilience. This presentation summarizes and critiques the range of global policy responses to the pandemic that address pivotal resilience dimensions for K-12 students. A key analytic objective will be to juxtapose the most salient global policy responses against the available best-practice literature.
keywords: Academic Resilience, Education Policy, COVID-19.