In 2019, COVID-19 was found in China, and then quickly spread across the globe, eventually reaching the United States. As such, in March of 2020 American schools were forced to shut down for a few weeks, before moving into virtual learning for the remainder of the year. In Conroe ISD, this followed into the next school year, until some people switched to in person learning after a few weeks into the new year.
In general, the “COVID year“ had full virtual learning capabilities available to students, however, some students switched to in-person learning. This caused teachers to teach both online classes alongside their regular, in-person, teaching. The schools also began to rely on technology more in general, and this caused an increased use of Chromebooks and other technologies.
The Caledonian conducted a study directed to students in grades 5-12 about their feelings during COVID-19, and the 2020-2021 academic year. .The study found that half of the participants said that they felt set back by the year. Students that were in fifth and sixth grade, 60% felt set back by the year, while the majority of students in 7-12 claim they were not set back.
Of the students who did feel behind, most noted their inability to learn fundamentals, which has also hurt them since, as they lacked needed prior knowledge to learn new topics. Ian Burch explained this impact, “my freshman level Geography teacher explicitly asked me why our class struggled with architecture, a topic we should’ve learned in sixth grade. But [few] did.”
This was found particularly in students in the fifth and sixth grades. Whereas students in 7-12 noted that the schoolwork was just generally harder to do virtually, as well as the fact that it was easy to get off track during the time. There were also those who mentioned annoyance at the pandemic procedures and mask mandates, and also noted some that the technology such as Chromebooks were not very good at the time.
All in all, it seems that generally schools and their districts struggled to get the fundamentals across to students, but they had been able to teach advanced topics effectively.
