Are Good Academic Grades Always Reflective of Learning?
Writing involves a lot of thinking. Thus, I encourage my writing students to spend time thinking about what they want to write before they sit down to write. I do most of my “writing” while engaging in other activities—not while sitting in front of my computer.
Each month, I tend to have a dominant thought that consumes my thinking. This month, I have been thinking a lot about how good academic grades are not always reflective of learning, and they especially were not during the past year and a half.
As a busy single parent, until recently, I had used my son's grades as a quick point of reference for how he was doing with school, and his grades indicated to me that he was doing very well.
That said, last month, after he took the CAASPP (state testing), I was shocked to hear him tell me that the math portion of it, which had always been easy for him, was "hard." I thought about how this year's test assessed him on the eighth-grade curriculum that he "learned" in seventh grade (during the 2019-2020 school year). Then, I thought about how he missed an entire quarter of instruction that school year as schools tried to figure out how to navigate the pandemic. It was then that his comment began to make more sense.
In addition to this reminder of the absence of instruction during the last quarter of the 2019-2020 school year, I was reminded of the significant reduction in education during the most recent school year when my son took high school course placement testing in early spring. He told me after the tests that there was a lot of information on them that he had not been taught the last school year and that the subject departments at his middle school had to "pick and choose" which materials to teach then because there were not enough weekly instruction hours to cover the usual curriculum. I should have never found any of this information to be surprising because since mid-March 2020, most schools' hours were, on average, equivalent to those of preschools.
Initially, I was hopeful that schools were cramming more instruction into those reduced hours. However, the bottom line is that reduced instruction time equals reduced instruction. In addition, I think that a lot of schoolwork that happened outside of class time since March 2020 was busywork, which can be difficult for parents to identify due to work and other responsibilities.
Unfortunately, we as parents can't turn back the hands of time and teach our children everything that they should have learned during the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years, but going forward, we can be aware of signs of learning loss and take appropriate proactive actions, using a quality versus quantity approach, to correct that loss before it is too late for our children to catch up.
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