Lost Learning…it happens all the time

Take a second to think of the last learning opportunity you experienced. Perhaps it was taking a First Aid course. Maybe it was reviewing for an exam as part of professional development accreditation. Or maybe it was just attending a lecture or watching a documentary on a topic of interest. How much did you retain the next morning? How about a week later? A month? Year?

The point?

We all know that learning is lost all the time as very few can remember 100% of what was expected or even desired. Recently, there have been numerous headlines about the phenomena of ‘Lost Learning’ (here are just three of many: The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading, Pandemic learning loss is real and kids need help to catch up, education experts say, Learning loss while out of school —is it now time to worry?). The issue here is not necessarily learning loss by the students, it’s often teaching time lost for the curriculum they are meant to cover.

Being a former teacher, I heard time and time again by colleagues at the upper levels that the students hadn’t been prepared enough. An example; middle school math teachers felt that the elementary teachers hadn’t taught the students the basics. High school teachers said the same things about the middle school teachers and the same has been said by university professors about high school learning. The irony is that the ‘learning loss’ occurs daily when learners are taught things that they are not interested in or ready for. As Jennilea Hortop, a former colleague at NIST International school stated, ‘just because you taught something doesn’t mean they learned it’. Truer words have not been spoken.

In his New York Times opinion article in September, economist Bryan Caplan makes a related point: “I figure that most of the learning students lost in Zoom school is learning they would have lost by early adulthood even if schools had remained open. My claim is not that in the long run remote learning is almost as good as in-person learning. My claim is that in the long run in-person learning is almost as bad as remote learning.”

The idea of lost learning is a concept based on perception. Sure, many students may be ‘behind’ students who previously performed better in school subjects, but there are probably numerous examples of what they might have learned about a pandemic (virus transmission, online communication, time management, coping with loneliness and depression, etc) that wouldn’t necessarily be assessed. Much of what was learned during the pandemic will be remembered for years, if not a lifetime.

This speaks to experiential and self-directed learning. We tend to learn and remember things we are truly interested in and keep us engaged. No doubt, students may have ‘fallen behind’ the normal, average progression of a cohort in their grade level but we need to recognize (a) there is always time to catch up on those ‘missed’ learning opportunities (b) that everyone lost this time simultaneously so no one, really, is at a disadvantage (what’s the rush?) and (c) we need to celebrate and acknowledge what might have been learned outside of the regular classroom.

In the end, is it really lost learning if there are still opportunities to learn it later…should one want to?