The footprint of the COVID-19 pandemic in reading performance of students in the U.S. with and without disabilities.
Nationwide data show COVID knocked all readers down, yet the disability gap stayed the same size.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Chatzoglou et al. (2023) looked at national reading scores before and after COVID-19. They used U.S. NAEP data from 2019 and 2022. Kids with and without disabilities were both tracked.
What they found
Reading scores dropped for every group. The surprise: non-disabled students fell slightly farther than students with disabilities. The gap between the two groups actually shrank.
How this fits with other research
Channell et al. (2013) already showed students with ID read below verbal-matched peers. The new data say the pandemic hurt everyone, but it did not widen the old disability gap.
Chen et al. (2019) found braille readers with visual impairments also lag behind. Eleni’s work adds print-reading kids to the same story: COVID made every group slide.
Jou et al. (2023) got positive results with a picture layout for dyslexic students. Their small win reminds us that targeted tweaks can still help, even after big losses.
Why it matters
Your caseload likely includes kids who are now a year or more behind in reading. Start each plan with a quick NAEP-level benchmark. Then add the phonological drills Moore flagged and the visual supports Yung-Tsan showed. The gap did not grow, so catch-up is doable with steady, evidence-based instruction.
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Run a one-minute oral reading fluency probe and chart words correct per minute to see where each student lands post-COVID.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Many schools around the world involuntarily began remote learning in March of 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought immediate changes and challenges to teaching and learning that are likely to influence student achievement into the foreseeable future. While large numbers of students face difficulties in learning to read under typical conditions, remote learning resulted in substantial deficits in reading outcomes. AIMS: This study aimed to examine the relative impact of the pandemic on reading performance in United States (U.S.) for students with and without disabilities. METHODS: and procedure: In this interpretive analysis, we compared the progress of a large sample of students (n = 219,500) by using the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, in two grade levels (Grades 4 and 8), with and without disabilities, at two time points (2019 and 2022). OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Statistically significant decreases were identified on the reading outcomes of students in U.S. Students without disabilities experienced a significant decrease in their reading outcomes pre- and post-pandemic, compared to students with disabilities (SWDs). CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: We discuss the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on students' reading performance and the implications for effective reading instructions in the future.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2023 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2023.104585