Three Years after Pandemic, Students Still Far Behind

2023 · VOA Learning English

This speaker is a general-american model. Each line below can be recorded and scored against it.

Transcript

1. In the third full school year since the COVID-19 pandemic began, students continued to feel the effects of school closures.

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2. Some leading experts and education officials worry that the learning loss caused by the pandemic may be long-term.

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3. Making matters worse, many students are missing school. Chronic absenteeism is becoming more common at school districts around the country.

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4. Some students went missing from the attendance rolls during the pandemic and have never been accounted for.

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5. And in a year of growing artificial intelligence technology, AI has also entered the classroom.

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6. Some schools have banned the use of chatbots like ChatGPT.

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7. Other teachers are using the new technology to help students, hoping they use the technology in appropriate ways.

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8. Here is a look at the big issues that shaped education in 2023 and will shape education in the year to come.

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9. Department of Education released the scores from a national math and reading test that is given to 13-year-olds.

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10. About 8,700 students took the test in both math and reading in late 2022.

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11. The department’s information shows that those are the largest point decreases between tests recorded since 1973.

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12. The test asks students to read short passages and identify the main idea or some facts.

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13. In math, students had to answer simple multiplication and geometry questions.

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14. The latest test scores show that American 13-year-old students are back to their lowest level in math since 1990 and lowest reading level since 2004.

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15. Math and Reading scores were no better outside the U.S. Students around the world suffered historic setbacks in reading and math.

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16. That information comes from results of the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

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17. The PISA is an international comparative study of the scores of 15-year-old students on tests in reading, math and science.

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18. It is administered by OECD. Nearly 700,000 students worldwide took part in the study.

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19. PISA is given every three years. The latest results showed an unprecedented drop in performance” since 2018.

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20. The 2022 results were released on December 5. It is the first extensive study with data on how the pandemic has affected student performance around the world.

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21. The COVID-19 pandemic was a major reason for the worldwide score drops. But science and reading scores were dropping even before the pandemic.

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22. This suggests there are other reasons for the decrease.

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23. Factors such as the level of investment in education, the social value and pay levels of teachers, and educational beliefs of students have all influenced educational results,

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24. Education officials and activists are concerned about an increase in the number of students who are absent for many days during the school year.

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25. Education policy experts call the problem “chronic absenteeism.”

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26. Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing more than 10 percent out of the days in a school year. There are many reasons why students miss a lot of school.

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27. Certain physical problems and mental health problems, which have increased since the pandemic, are possible causes.

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28. Certain community conditions also can affect attendance, says Joshua Childs, a professor of education policy at the

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29. University of Texas at Austin. These include whether a student has safe transportation to and from school and whether the school itself is a safe environment.

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30. Childs added that if families do not feel connected with the school community or do not value education that can add to absenteeism.

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31. Hundreds of thousands of American students have also dropped out of public schools since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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32. They have essentially gone missing from schools.

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33. A recent examination found an estimated 240,000 students in 21 states whose absences from school could not be explained.

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34. These students did not move out of state. They also did not sign up for private school or home-school.

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35. The issue of missing students received a lot of attention in 2020 after the pandemic closed schools around the country.

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36. In the years since, however, the issue has largely become a budgeting problem. There is no longer urgency to find the students who disappeared from school.

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37. Early in the pandemic, school workers would go to the students’ homes to try and help them return to the classroom. Most of those efforts have ended.

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38. Changing technology The COVID-19 pandemic showed how useful digital technology could be for schools. But it also showed the limitations of technology in the educational setting.

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39. Millions of students were able to attend classes online and avoid spreading the virus. But many students failed to learn by such methods.

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40. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization or UNESCO) argues against unsupervised wide use of digital tools and AI in education.

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41. A recent UNESCO report says there is little evidence that wide technology use improves learning.

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42. The organization says digital educational tools can never replace the human connection of teacher and student.

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43. There is a very large divide, or gap, between rich and poor countries when it comes to digital resources “Even if connectivity was universal it would still be necessary to

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44. demonstrate …that digital technology offers real added value in terms of effective learning,” the UNESCO report says.

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45. Many educators fear students will use the AI tool ChatGPT to write their reports or cheat on homework.

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46. New York City school officials started blocking the writing tool on school devices and networks in January. But other teachers are including it in the classroom.

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47. Donnie Piercey is a teacher in Lexington, Kentucky. He told his fifth-grade students to try and outsmart the tool that was creating writing assignments

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48. Piercey says his job is to prepare students for a world where knowledge of AI will be required.

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49. He describes ChatGPT as just the latest technology in his 17 years of teaching that raised concerns about the possibility of cheating.

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50. Other tools include Google, Wikipedia and YouTube. “As educators, we haven’t figured out the best way to use artificial intelligence yet,” he added.

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51. “But it’s coming, whether we want it to or not.” I’m Dan Novak.

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