Description

Academic performance of students from a background with higher levels of maternal education has traditionally been associated with higher academic achievement in the areas of reading and mathematics in comparison to households with lower levels of maternal education (Zadeh et al., 2010). Given pre-existing disparities, there is reason to believe that the change from in-person to remote learning, as a preventative measure of the COVID-19 pandemic, would disproportionately affect the reading gains of kindergarten children of lower SES households increasing the disparities (Bao et al., 2020). We had a unique opportunity to test this through an ongoing longitudinal study that spanned the onset of the pandemic. We report how the academic performance of kindergarten students during the last two quarters of in-person classroom learning and the first quarter of remote instruction is influenced by maternal education level. We tested five- to six-year-old children at three time points from fall 2019 (n = 53, mean age = 5.99, gender = 29 F) to spring 2020 (n = 40, mean age = 6.64, gender = 23 F) using two tests from the Woodcock Johnson Tests of Early Cognitive and Academic Development (ECAD) (Number Sense and Letter Word Identification) to measure performance of quantitative and literacy skills. The students were divided into groups based on reported maternal education (high school or less and some college or higher). Our preliminary results corroborate prior findings of disparities in academic performance across students based on maternal education level, across all measured time points. Novelly, we demonstrated that these disparities increased during the first quarter of school instructed remotely. In particular, only students from households with higher maternal education levels experienced significant improvements in their performance of quantitative and literacy skills across the transition to remote learning. In contrast, students from households with lower maternal education levels did not show improvement across the transition to remote instruction. These results support our hypothesis of increased academic disparities associated with maternal education during the transition to remote instruction. Potential future directions include quality assessments of technological resources available in the home environment and additional comparisons with grade point average.