TITLE:
An Exploratory Study of Elementary School Students’ Reading Performance Scores before and after COVID-19
AUTHORS:
Timothy Goodman, Patty LeBlanc, William G. LeBlanc
KEYWORDS:
COVID-19, Pandemic, Reading Performance, Reading Achievement, Elementary Education, Reading Development, i-Ready
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.12 No.5,
May
31,
2024
ABSTRACT: This study explored the reading performance scores of elementary school students in a single Florida school district before and after school closures in spring 2020 due to COVID-19. The nonexperimental study of archival data was designed to explore three subgroups of third-grade students’ i-Ready reading diagnostic scale scores from five different assessment periods: before school closures in January 2020 and four subsequent assessment periods after face-to-face instruction resumed in fall 2020. The three subgroups included: the initial cohort (N = 2006), which did not include students in Exceptional Student Education (N = 580), and students who were designated as English Language Learners (N = 169). The subgroups did not include students who had been retained at any point in the past. Descriptive statistics were computed for each of the subgroups and reported. The mean scale scores of each subgroup were compared to the 2018-2019 i-Ready national norms for each of the five assessment periods. The results of the comparisons revealed that each subgroup’s mean reading scale scores were significantly different from the national norm groups’ mean reading scale scores. The mean reading scores of each subgroup were significantly lower (p