UNL team takes a look at gaps in remote learning across the U.S.

Elementary teachers nationwide believe that, on average, just three out of five of their students were prepared to advance to the next grade level when schools shut down.

There’s no doubt, the end to the 2019–2020 school year was unpredictable and certainly caused some issues.

With students and teachers having to immediately adjust to remote learning, a team at University of Nebraska Lincoln conducted a survey to find out just how effective that learning was.

“Teachers were really worried about students academic performance and that they were not given enough instruction,” Michael Hebert said.

The survey showed that 69 percent of teachers reported that they either do not believe remote instruction was effective or they were unsure about its success.

On top of that, a big concern for those students who are disadvantaged when it comes to having the resources,

“There was a very small percent of people that said they didn’t connect with their students at all. There was another percent that said although they provided live instructions, there was a percent of students that didn’t show up to any remote sessions,” Hebert said.

While unfortunately, there’s nothing people can change when it comes to what happened in the spring, the UNL team is hopeful that these results can help shed some light on things that need to be changed and let teachers and parents know, they weren’t alone in the struggle.

“Its important that we come up with new methods to monitor progress if we have to continue this remote instruction,” Marc Goodrich said.

The team was made up of Michael Hebert, Marc Goodrich and Jessica Namkung, all faculty in the Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders in the College of Education and Human Sciences.

To read more on their findings, you can read their article here.