‘Lost Year’ for Education: Global Lessons on How Students Can Rebound

Societies that rebuilt their education systems after war and natural disasters may offer lessons on how to close the learning gap opened by the pandemic. “A catastrophe, a pandemic is likely to have a negative impact on outcomes,” says Emma García, an education expert at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Nonetheless, she says these negative effects can be corrected after a few years if teaching resources are redirected to students who most need them. Student assessments need to move beyond test scores to capture such skills, so that educators can reinforce and leverage students’ social and emotional capabilities that may have improved during the pandemic. “Resilience, tolerance, understanding, sympathy, creativity – those are assets,” she says. Indeed, from Afghanistan to Sierra Leone to the United States, there are some reasons for optimism—not only that students can recover academically, but that they can gain healthy coping mechanisms for future challenges.  Complete Article HERE