Delaying studies during a pandemic: Can science help?

More private lessons? Therapy lessons? Small or large groups? The solutions will undoubtedly be different according to countries and age groups, but even on a case-by-case basis it will be difficult to select strategies based on evidence, Sorry for a recent report From the scientific journal temper nature. The main problem is that many practitioners do not believe this [l’éducation] It would absolutely be a science,” said Andreas Schleicher, who heads the education division of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “A professor is not expected to research academic journals, and education policy is often determined by the ideology of civil servants rather than research that shows what works.”

However, the risks are great. UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) estimates that 1.6 billion students I was touched by COVID. In rich countries, the most vulnerable children were more vulnerable than others, and poor countries as a whole were more affected. In the Philippines and Bangladesh, schools have been completely closed for 13 months.

Except that “affected” It can mean many things: What lessons were lost in a cell that have not been (yet) regained? What will be the impact on the personal and professional lives of these young people in the future? In the Asia Pacific region, the Director of the Department of Inclusive Education estimates that 10 million young people will not return to school completely. Even in the United States, where schools were closed for a shorter period and reopened last fall, in many areas we see an abnormally high rate of “chronic absenteeism” in high schools, I mentioned recently The New York Times.

Could these two years of the pandemic be an opportunity to rethink certain aspects of teaching, rather than go back to “normalcy”? “Whenever a crisis occurs in the world, we hurry to return to the old normal,” he declares in temper nature Australian education scholar, John Hattie.

Where the post-pandemic period can be an opportunity, It is precisely on the research side. Funds are available to help schools around the world and many countries are eager to see what works. temper nature He cites two organizations with a strong start in this field (the British Endowment for Education, and the American Institute of Education Sciences) whose investments will undoubtedly come under scrutiny by a large number of people. “This is a truly unique moment to change the debate about evidence in education,” says psychologist and researcher Nancy Madden of the Johns Hopkins School of Education in Baltimore. “People want something that works, they just don’t keep doing what they used to do.”