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            Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, people had and still have to learn and adjust to the way the world has changed in response to the virus. Changes in life were made in various different ways and places, but one place that was greatly affected was education. Students have changed the way they have learned mostly through online and remote learning, but their performance in this new environment has been met with varying degrees of both success and failure.

Data taken from the Illinois Board of Education found a variety of differences in performance between groups of students from third to eleventh grade who took standardized tests such as the SAT and IAR from 2019 and 2021. It was found within this data, that within English Language Arts, that all students had a drop in their performance from 37.4 percent to 31.2 percent, and in Mathematics, students had a drop from 32 to 26.3 percent. More specific categories of students were mentioned throughout the data as well, such as low-income students who were found to have a drop in performance of 7 percent in English, and a drop in performance of 6.7 percent in mathematics. Evidently, it would appear that students overall are seeing a significant dip in performance when it comes to these areas through the time of the pandemic. So if middle school and high school students appear to be struggling throughout the course of the pandemic with online learning, how have college students fared?

Owen Van Der Karr, a sophomore at Illinois State University, who had taken his entire first year of college online, was asked about his personal experiences with online learning in college. “It really was not something I was ever used to,” Owen said. “When you have lived your entire life learning one way, in person, it’s almost just alien in a way to learn only remotely or online.” One important question that was also asked was how Owen’s performance in his first year in college was compared to high school, which was almost entirely in person for Owen.”I really don’t want to come off like I’m making some sort of excuse for not doing well my first year, but when you have to essentially change the entire way you learn, you can find that you have issues in things like time management that I didn’t even know I had. And honestly, I feel that this issue was greatly amplified by having to do everything solely online” Owen is not the only student who has had this experience, another student, Matthew Tutterow, also found online learning to be quite a strange change to his education. Matthew is a music major at Illinois State, and out of every major possible Matthew feels that he was monumentally in one of the toughest spots when it came to learning. “It really was very strange not being able to go in person most of the time, and being more or less hindered in learning how to properly play and learn new instruments,” Matthew said. “I also had basically no time being in the marching band as well, which I really was looking forward to for both the experience of it as well as learning more about music in this environment.” 

Other than both of these given students, there is some data that would support the possibility that online learning has negatively affected students’ performance within college. Data taken by Oneclass.com, which interviewed 14,000 college students throughout the country back at the beginning of the pandemic in the Fall of 2020 which can be found through a graph on their website, found that 85.4 percent of students felt that the new conditions of online learning negatively affected their performance. While only a small portion of students felt as if they had benefited from the new learning arrangements at 5.5 percent. Once again evidently, it appears that students in this case college students have had a hard time adjusting to online learning just as much as the high school and middle school students mentioned earlier.

Although many of the restrictions that were put in place by many learning institutions were made with the intent to protect students’ health, there appears to be some damage that has been done to the performance of students from all walks of life in school. Now that these restrictions are slowly being lifted it is possible that more data could be released in the future for everyone to better understand the impact that some of the learning changes had on students, but for now, it does not appear to have been entirely positive for the students.

Sources:

Interviewees:

Owen Van Der Karr(friend): (Phone Call) contact info: 815-584-6616

Matthew Tutterow(friend): (Phone Call) contact info: 815-584-7099