Understanding pandemic grade slip: the facts  

The nucleus of the problem is that students across the country are still struggling with the effects of pandemic learning loss. 

It’s not unexpected: when school gates closed in March 2020, educators and legislators were aware that it was going to have an impact on learning progress in children and young people. But the amount of time that those classroom doors remained closed did blindside most of our projections around skills and grades, so we’re still playing catch-up with an entire generation of learners. 

How much learning time did students lose during the pandemic? 

On average, Canadian students lost more than 135 days of school across the pandemic period. If we consider that a normal working school day is around six to seven hours and a lesson is one, the math is simple enough:  

🧠 Students in Canada usually receive between 950 and 1,000 hours of in-person instruction a year, and lessons are usually around an hour long. 

🧠 An average 6.5 hour school day of in-person learning time lost on each of those 135 closed days means that they’re down by around 878 hour-long in-person lessons over the two years, compared to their peers who graduated before Covid-19 hit the country. 

Educators effected a Herculean turnaround and implemented remote education plans within a few days of school closures. They continued to administer those lessons as students stayed at home, but online learning didn’t prove as effective as in-school instruction when it comes to supporting learners and fostering skill growth. So now we’re dealing with the impact of those lost hours of classroom learning, as well as a host of other factors that are impacting test scores besides. 

Why might test scores be lower after the online learning period? 

We can’t just lay pandemic learning loss and declining standardized test scores at the feet of any one stimulus. The period was characterised by intense stress on educators and learners alike, and many found that the changes to their learning lives didn’t come with a transitionary period or much training and support in how to go forward. 

• Remote education isn’t as effective as in-class instruction when it comes to learning new skills and building knowledge for tests. It’s easier for students to get distracted, learning patterns aren’t as holistic, and it’s harder for them to access their class teacher to ask for help. 
  
  

• Lesson attendance fell during the remote education period, especially in learners from low socioeconomic backgrounds, who may have been drafted into childcare or household responsibilities by working parents. 
  
  

• Many teachers aren’t as effective online as they are in the classroom as an overwhelming majority didn’t have any experience in administering education remotely: again, students from lower socioeconomic groups were far less likely to have benefitted from an educator who was well-versed in remote education. 
  

• The pandemic period exacerbated an already incredibly poor period of children and young people’s mental health, with increases reported in depression, anxiety, screen time, and sedentary lifestyles.  
  

• Huge numbers of learners struggled to access the technologies that make remote education viable: there’s a large degree of digital poverty and lack of internet access in low socioeconomic status neighbourhoods and in Indigenous households in particular. Many students were reduced to taking lessons on mobile phones, which have varying levels of effectiveness for the task.
  
  

• And we’re just not exam experts anymore: in most provinces, standardized testing went on hiatus during the pandemic, so both learners and educators were less prepared when the papers rolled back in in 2023.

What about learners with dyslexia? 

Remote education the potential to widen achievement gaps for learners with learning differences like dyslexia. We already know that their progress has dipped the most, and current cohorts are now months behind where previous cohorts have been. 

Some of it is a resourcing issue: when lockdown hit, many lost access to vital in-school support programs, professionals and technologies. But in addition to material losses, there were provision deficits in the software too. Many screen readers on home devices struggled with online learning interfaces like modular desktops, shared screens and chat windows, so millions of learners have struggled to access the full picture as education shifted into the virtual.  

What the test score data tells us…

Percentile averages vary from province to province, but there’s an overall downturn in standardized testing scores across the country when we compare them to the grades that learners were achieving pre-pandemic.   

In Ontario, math scores on standardized tests across three grades have either fallen or sit stagnant at low percentiles. For the 2021-22 school year, results show that 47% of Grade 6 students met the provincial standard in math, down from 50% in 2018-19. As learners get older, however, the curve deepens: for Grade 9 students, only 52% met the provincial standard, which is down 23 points from the 75% it was at three years ago. 

In English, the deficit is nowhere near as pronounced, but there hasn’t been much growth either: scores from 2018-9 and 2022-3 look very similar, despite the additional $180 million education funding invested by the Ontario government. 

In Alberta, provincewide, 86.8% of students passed the English 30-1 exam in 2018-19. That figure slipped to 78.8% in 2021-22; but maths deficits run even deeper: whereas 83.4% of students achieved the acceptable standard on the Math 30-1 diploma exam in 2018-19, in the period 2021-22, only 66.5% of students passed the exam.

…But here’s what the test score data actually tells us.

• Students are very much struggling in exams. 

• Math grades are in a steep decline. 

• English grades are in a more moderate decline, but English skills are the necessary ones that unlock the whole curriculum—so it’s more dangerous in the long run. 

• Learning recovery isn’t happening anywhere near as quickly or as easily as we’d like it to (it is about on par with what most educators predicted, though). 

• Large investment initiatives likely aren’t going to be enough to get the learners most effected by the pandemic over the grade boundary in a meaningful way: these programs take time, and that’s something our learners don’t have a lot of before tests come around again. 

  
  

Take control of exams again with C-Pen Exam Reader 2!

We know that student reading ability has taken a dive over the pandemic. We know that learners with reading differences like dyslexia have seen some of the worst learning deficits take hold, and that things aren’t as they should be amongst the neurotypical student body either. And we know that nobody performs their best when they’re under pressure and time constraints, but that’s the nature of standardized testing.  

What can we do to help learners beat test stress once and for all? 

Meet C-Pen Exam Reader 2: a text-to-speech reading aid built just for exams! It’s kind of like having a tutor in your pocket when you head into the exam hall, and it’s got the power to make reading anxiety a thing of the past in mock tests, class tests, and standardized testing. 

With a user-friendly, zero-storage design, C-Pen Exam Reader 2 makes decoding exam questions as easy as scan, listen, understand: simply move the end of the pen across the words on the page to hear them relayed via the headphones. There’s no need for in-person support or separate rooming so students feel less visible, which means that schools and colleges can save on provision costs too. Everybody wins! 

Worded math problems? No problem! 

That’s great for giving English skills a boost… but what about math, where learning loss seems to run deepest? 

Some of the most difficult parts of a maths paper are working out what you’re being asked to do. When learners have dyslexia, anxiety or even just a lower level of literacy than the paper expects, worded math problems can become impenetrable, and cost a lot of vital marks.  

With C-Pen Exam Reader 2, decoding long-form questions and written problems is made easy with the help of simple text-to-speech: when learners can fully understand the questions, they can focus on the important parts (the answers).   

Find out what C-Pen Exam Reader 2 could do in your school! 

To find out more about C-Pen Exam Reader 2 and how it can boost standardized test scores in your school or college, head on over to C-Pen Exam Reader 2 Hub at Scanning Pens, where you can find testimonials, resources, and a full breakdown of everything our clever little pen can do. 
 
You can also take part in one of our FREE trials for schools and educators—to find out more, head over to our C-Pen Exam Reader 2 trials page!