A Tale of Four Students in a Pandemic
The Four Students in a Pandemic
Zaake the performer in a rural-public school: is a nine-year-old primary four pupil in rural Uganda, was performing well with nearly no learning gaps before the pandemic. He attends a government school which remains closed. While he tried to follow radio lessons in the first few months after school closure, he eventually lost interest and stopped. He has not been learning for six months.
Miriam the home-schooled girl from the big city; lives in Kampala and is nine years old. Before the pandemic, she had a significant learning gap in maths. Miriam has been attending the televised and internet-based lessons held by her private school. Her parents enrolled her for a maths tutorial, and she has caught up with the curriculum.
Struggling rural boy: Ochola is a nine-year-old boy who lives in rural Uganda. He had significant gaps in all his subjects and was unable to follow the radio lessons.
Semi-urban performer: Nanfuka is a nine-year-old girl, who lives in an urban centre in a rural district. She had little learning gaps and was doing quite well in school. She has continued to listen to radio lessons though they do not cover the whole curriculum.
What is the main lesson in the above four stories?
In general, all students in Uganda are ‘learning out of school’ and have varying degrees of access to learning with vastly different home circumstances. The pandemic has introduced a new vocabulary of common phrases into the world of education. We hear of ‘building back better’, ‘learning gaps’, ‘routine assessment based exams’, ‘impact of Covid 19 on attainment' and 'pandemic pregnancies' among many others. Beyond their latent meanings, all the above phrases carve out their position in the 2020 education lexicon.
The above phrases mean different things to different people, governments and students. As I attempt to select one phrase which is of critical policy concern, I realise that the terms are not in competition with each other. Education is in conflict and therefore writing compellingly about one means leaving out an equally important issue in education. Nonetheless, choose I must, and I have gone with the phrase 'learning gap'. This now-popular phrase has increasingly captured the attention of many who seek to 'close the learning gap' among students, as countries try to 'build back better'.
The Learning Gap: What Is It?
The learning gap is a situation where a student begins to struggle or fall behind with their academic progression, which happens when the student is working at a lower level than expected. I will use an example to show how easily learning gaps can form. Children in lower primary school learn to read the alphabet then progress to three or four-lettered words before moving on to more complicated words and sentences. It is anticipated that if a child fails to master the three to four-lettered word combinations, they will struggle to read more complicated words or sentences however simple they may be, resulting in an inability to read fluently or comprehend even the simplest sentences.
You may wonder that if children grow at different levels and have different gifts and skills, is it possible to eliminate learning gaps? The simple answer is; no. There will always exist within a group of students, different learning gaps and therefore the assessments that teachers do, often identify learning gaps among students and ideally, remedial lessons, one to one support or other interventions are proposed to support each student to reach a minimum level of competency before moving on to the next level. The next question may be; if learning gaps naturally exist among children and this is a normal part of the learning process, why is the learning gap specifically identified as an outcome of the pandemic? The pandemic resulted in an unprecedented number of children being out of school with vastly different levels of access to education creating unprecedented inequalities in learning. The learning gap existed before the pandemic and therefore this will compound to make it even harder for students who remain out of school. The four fictitious students during a pandemic are just an example of how the pandemic has affected learning.
As I write this, on the 15th October 2020, only candidate classes are scheduled to return to school in Uganda, and the rest of the student population remains at home. The challenge for the teachers is to identify how much learning loss has occurred and to come up with a catch-up plan alongside trying to complete the curriculum from which the exams are going to be based. Learning gaps are not easy to identify because students are perpetually learning new topics, so in effect, the tracking of learning loss is not only retrospective but also concurrent. If learning achieved at one grade level serves as the foundation on which the understanding of more complex ideas and concepts is based, then learning is continuous from the skills the student has already mastered.
What does this mean for Tusome Africa?
In reviewing our focus programme areas post-pandemic, we believe that assessment of learning loss is a critical priority as we reprioritise our support for rural schools. We believe that the first step for schools is to assess learning loss and then to invest in systems that continue to identify students' learning needs and strategies to get students not only to pre-pandemic levels but to levels ‘they ought to have been at’ if the pandemic had not happened. Learning gaps need to be identified, analysed, and approached with clarity and we summarise our thoughts on this below:
Access to learning during the pandemic has been sporadic across the country. Without understanding where the student learning gaps are, the risk of leaving many students behind becomes real and the risk of increased learning inequalities will be actualised.
Identifying the learning needs of students as well as the examinable content for this year is a priority.
Investment in routine assessment and examinations should be prioritised, and incentivised among schools with a focus on learning gap closure.
As many countries reimagine the education sector, the shackles of a factory-style education system must be interrogated for fitness of purpose in a post-pandemic era where boldness and innovation must be embraced as we forge forward.
Author: Joan Makuthi
October 2020