What’s the Best Way to Address Unfinished Learning? It’s Not Remediation, Study Says

A new study, co-sponsored by a curriculum company, suggests a promising strategy for addressing unfinished learning in math after a pandemic year—but finds that Black and Latino students and those in high-poverty schools may have less access to the approach.

As schools gear up for the summer and fall, one of the top priorities is meeting children’s academic needs after months of disrupted instruction. Several studies of interim assessments have shown that students’ progress in math, especially, has been interrupted during the pandemic.

A common approach to teaching content that students may have missed is remediation: Going back to cover skills and concepts that students haven’t mastered from the previous grade.

But another option is what’s called acceleration—moving forward with grade-level content and only addressing prerequisite skills and concepts from the previous grade as necessary, when they’re needed to work with grade-level content. It’s been recommended by a host of instructional organizations and implemented with success in several school districts in during the pandemic.

Read the full article in Education Week.