We suspected it, but a large study of 7,500 students confirms it: the pandemic has caused school results in reading to drop. Class closures hurt struggling students first. The gap widened with the strongest students, who achieved good grades despite the upheaval caused by COVID-19.
The pandemic has reduced the average of fourth-grade students in the ministerial test in reading by 8 percentage points (10%) (from 77% to 69%). The pass rate also dropped by 11 points: 72% of students achieved a passing grade in 2021, compared to 83% in 2019.
“We see that the gap is widening between vulnerable students and the strongest students,” says Catherine Haeck, professor of economics at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). She is also co-director of the Observatory for the education and health of children at CHU Sainte-Justine.
She and her team had access to the results of the 2021 ministerial examination in reading of 7,500 fourth-grade students (out of 12,000), from 182 schools. Half of the Quebec school service centers provided their data. The research team compared these results to those of the same ministerial test in 2019, before the pandemic.
The differences in success are significant between the two years. And the longer classes remained closed, the lower the grades. Especially for students who have learning difficulties.
The average grade of students in the top 10% remained about the same in 2021 as before the pandemic. However, the marks of the weakest students fell dramatically, by nearly 20 percentage points (from 42% to 23%).
The achievement gap between boys and girls has remained about the same: girls still obtain higher grades than boys, except among the top performers, where the results are comparable.
“The pandemic has affected school results, but the good news is that the school in presence, it works. When children can go to school, it helps to reduce the gaps [entre les élèves] “, explains Catherine Haeck.
Catch-up efforts
The teacher believes that the school network will have to continue to catch up over the next few months. She has a favorable bias towards the tutoring program set up by Quebec in January 2021, because it is generally “one of the most effective methods” to help young people in difficulty.
Catherine Haeck and her team plan to analyze the results of this year’s ministerial reading test to determine whether the trends observed in 2021 continue or not.
It is essential to continue to catch up, because Quebec has fallen behind in terms of education compared to other developed countries, argues the professor. Barely 36% of Quebecers aged 35 to 44 have a university degree, compared to 47.4% among the 10 most educated countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In Ontario, this proportion is 41%.
Labor shortages are hurting education efforts, according to data cited by Catherine Haeck: 35% of job vacancies in Quebec require no minimum education, 21% require a high school diploma, 29% require a certificate or diploma not university, and only 15% require a university degree. However, higher education pays off for graduates and for society as a whole, recalls the professor.