Upturning the COVID-Slide
Using Adaptive Technology to Measure, Identify, and Bridge Learning Gaps
Students will be returning to school — in whatever form it takes — in widely different places come fall.
Some students will return ready to advance to the next grade level. They would have, for the most part, regularly participated in their remote classes, kept up with their assignments, completed their assessments, and were able to able to successfully end the school year or curriculum at home.
Some may have even flourished in this unique atmosphere, achieving more than they might have in traditional classroom settings where flexibility and autonomy are less commonplace.
And others — perhaps most — will have experienced deep academic setbacks during months away from school, their learning gains stunted by inadequate access to the technology, materials, environments, routines, and knowledgeable others needed to support their academic growth.
How deeply COVID-19 school closures have impacted academic achievement across the board is uncertain. The NWEA estimates that, depending on grade level, students could lose between half and all the achievement growth one would expect in a normal academic year in math (1).
And while the true extent of learning loss remains unclear, one thing is certain: educators will need a consistent way to assess their students’ knowledge gaps and help bridge them, in a personalized, nimble, and data-driven manner.
But the question remains: how do we accomplish this? As they return to school after COVID-19, how will educators determine where their students are, and help them get to where they need to go?
Adaptive Learning: The Key to Bridging Learning Gaps
As many students return from extended periods of remote learning, or perhaps a complete break from learning, it is critical for them to have access to high-quality solutions that can support their course pathways and plans, supported by a thorough understanding and assessment of existing knowledge gaps.
Many education thought leaders, including the Gates Foundation and Educause, have argued these high-quality solutions may exist within adaptive learning programs. Intelligent adaptive learning platforms are promising, personalized solutions for students, that if implemented appropriately, are particularly effective in accurately assessing and identifying student’s existing level of mastery and shaping their progress as compared to their peers.
Based on the NWEA’s projections, school closures as a result of COVID-19 will drastically reduce retention of student learning gains, particularly in math. According to Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (2), this is likely because, unlike reading, parents are often uncomfortable facilitating math instruction in a home setting, and that they look to it as more of the “teacher’s domain.”
Because of this, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (2), also highlights the need for students to practice math using personalized solutions during periods away from school, given how incremental the knowledge gain is in the area of math.
How Does Adaptive Technology Work?
Adaptive technology can help educators perform “instructional triage” in the fall — assessing each student’s progress, proficiency, and mastery in a particular subject, identifying the gaps that must be filled, and providing the student with tailored content that they are ready, and able, to learn.
The best adaptive learning technology collects information about the student’s skills, knowledge, and confidence levels, and uses it to choose material, tasks, and scaffolds that match their needs.
Adaptive technology platforms like the award-winning ALEKS and McGraw Hill Rise, are better equipped to identify individual learning needs and customize learning pathways for a specific student. ALEKS uses adaptive questioning to quickly and accurately determine what a student knows and does not know in a course. The platform then instructs the student on the topics h/she is most ready to learn. As a student works through a course, ALEKS periodically reassesses the student to ensure that topics learned are also retained.
Rise, on the other hand, evaluates student responses to teacher-assigned, grade-specific content and associated questions that encourage review and reinforcement of topics, while building comprehension and mastery. Metacognition of student’s confidence is captured after each question, helping teachers understand student perceptions of what they know, or what they don’t. If students answer problems incorrectly, prescribed resources are served to the student to provide explanations on learning the concept. If students continue to struggle with a concept, they are more likely to encounter repeating questions — limiting guessing and rote memorization.
Detailed reporting dashboards help students track their learning with reports that reveal where they’re struggling. Teachers can see the overall class performance on the assignment and a specific student’s performance. They can easily identify students who may be at risk or behind grade level to help them learn the concepts and topics they need to perform at on or above grade level. They can also see which students may be performing above grade level, and may need more advanced content to challenge them.
The key to overcoming learning loss is achieving a trifecta — assessment, identification, and remediation/solution, for each individual student — means striking a delicate balance that adaptive learning technology can help facilitate.
Identifying the Gaps
Before the beginning of the school year, educators may opt to give their students an initial adaptive learning assessment to gather achievement data and measure information students were able to learn and retain during the extended break.
Different technologies gather different kinds of data about students, depending on how they work. Some of the learning analytics available within adaptive learning technology include:
- Individual students’ performance (for example, how many questions each
student got correct on a particular assessment) - Individual students’ engagement with the system (for example, the time spent using it, how that time was spent, or the number of assignments submitted)
- What sections have been mastered by a student, and what sections, or how much of each section, still remain to be mastered
- Students’ improvements or deterioration over time
- How sections, questions or objectives were received across a class group, helping to highlight what the class as a whole found easy or difficult
When students take an initial assessment, it allows the adaptive technology and the instructor to determine the student’s optimal entry point in the curriculum to start learning.
Understand What A Learner is Ready to Learn
While many students may return to school retaining half to none of their previous year’s learning gains in math, others may be ready to advance. It is important to have a system that can present students only with the content they are ready to learn — as content too challenging or not challenging enough can hinder academic progress in equal measure.
To ensure content is delivered to the student at the precise time, adaptive technology uses a complex algorithm to adjust future questions based on how the student performed on past questions — either increasing or decreasing the level of difficulty as needed. The primary benefit of adaptive assessment is its ability to provide a highly-detailed view of individual student knowledge. Compared to fixed-form testing, adaptive assessment can more accurately measure achievement. In addition, it can do it more efficiently, requiring a fewer number of items to accurately measure results.
Prepare them for the Future: College and Career Readiness
After an unconventional end to their high school careers, thousands of graduated seniors will be advancing to college in the fall. They, too, may be facing severe learning gaps in mathematics.
The achievement gaps are especially stark for Science Engineering Technology and Math (STEM) degree majors, for whom a mathematics and science foundation can present immediate barriers to entry. The majority of these students from underrepresented backgrounds attend high schools that do not offer advanced mathematics courses.
Math and science are fields where knowledge is incremental, and particularly important for there to be continued learning over time, since the information compounds.
How college freshmen fare in their first math course is an important indicator of their future graduation success. Many students who nominally meet the enrollment requirement turn out to be severely underprepared. Failure in an early course can bring discouragement and risk of dropping out. On the other hand, students with only punctual deficiencies or whose math skills are just a bit `rusty’ are barred from entering a credit-bearing course, wasting time and money.
One solution to this could be an adaptive learning platform like ALEKS Placement, Preparation and Learning (ALEKS PPL). Solutions like these offer a detailed diagnostic that tells whether the skills currently mastered by the student match the specific knowledge requirements of a course, and leverages the placement test results to offer ad hoc remediation. If a student falls short of placing in her target course, she has the opportunity to learn the missing material in a preparation module tailored to that course. There, the student can immediately work at bridging the gap, starting with material that she is ready to learn.
Conclusion
In whatever way students return to school in the fall, they will likely be facing deep academic setbacks. Adaptive technology can provide a comprehensive solution to post-pandemic learning loss by helping instructors identify learning gaps and bridge them with the content that the student is ready and able to learn.
For more on our award-winning adaptive learning solution, ALEKS, see the resources below:
References
- Kuhfeld, M. & Tarasawa, B. (2020). The COVID-19 slide: What summer learning loss can tell us about the potential impact of school closures on student academic achievement. NWEA.
- https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/16/06/summer-math-loss
