Student language development was stunted during the pandemic. Students were put in “rooms” with computers. This led to a “student lag” in developing cognitive processing skills. Students are struggling to upload and process language, and analyze and synthesize the information with stored knowledge for future use. You can hear student brain strain as they scrabble to process the information, often struggling to locate old information and hold new information long enough to make the necessary connections to process spoken and written information. Students are now working overtime to build and perhaps struggling maintain brain connections. This lends to many tired and overwhelmed students who often become frustrated. Students will often checkout of the learning process with or without proper interaction and instructional scaffolding. Students who lack intrinsic motivation will likely fall further behind. Intrinsic motivation pushes them to power through the struggle to develop the necessary connections to process information.
Many students didn’t have “normal” interactions with extended relatives, neighbors, classmates, or community members during the pandemic. These nonplanned community interactions usually stimulate the development of oral language capabilities that assist in developing written literacy skills. These skills are interwoven. Students also didn’t receive the “normal” opportunity to build and strengthen brain connections that students usually need to function within a regular school day. Many of these connections are developed through natural social interactions. Students may also develop part of these brain connections through purposeful instructional lessons that allow for practice of taught skill.
The severity of the processing lag will differ depending on different possible factors. Some of those factors are noted below:
- Student Age. Students are typically pruning unneeded brain connections during their preprimary years of education. Children typically have major cognitive changes around age 7 and 10-12 that correspond with physical developmental changes. Children between the ages of 2 and 6 spend a large amount of time mimicking their surroundings.
- Reading on a digital device. This usually develops skimmers of the words/passages, which decreases their ability to read deeply for accurate comprehension. This also affects their short-term memory development and use.
- Lack of interaction with individuals of higher cognitive processing skills
- Lack of investigative activities that require interaction outside of their home, like travel or trips to the local museums
- Lack of reading instruction and materials that may require the interaction of other individuals
- Lack of exercise
- Learning how to use technology
- Adjusting to longer usage of technology…staring at a computer screen, television or video game
- Less time writing manually. Manual writing assist in learning how to process and use information. This also assists in memory formation.
Students may need a few years to “catch-up” to their grade-level expectations. This may be shortened through explicit instruction. Students will be lacking necessary background information (foundational or prior knowledge) that may further impede the learning of new concepts. This may increase the need for differentiating and scaffolding of instruction and learning opportunities to ensure participation and ownership of new information taught. Patience may be one of the bigger pieces of the “catch-up” phase.
References
Piaget, J. & Inhelder, B. (2000/1966). The psychology of the child. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
