Assessing the links between risk factors, COVID-19 impacts, and reading skills

PROJECT SUMMARY The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a sudden yet persisting set of stressors for children across the U.S., that have had far-reaching impacts on their wellbeing, health, and academic outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic brought about an unprecedented number of school closures that have impacted learning for nearly 78 million children (UNESCO, 2021). Learning to read is crucial, as reading is a critical indicator of lifetime earnings, general health, and wellbeing (OECD, 2012). Before the pandemic, many children were already at risk for reading difficulties, with only 35% of U.S. fourth graders showing proficient levels of reading ability (NCES, 2019). These reading difficulties have only been magnified by COVID-19 related impacts. Data from the 2020-2021 school year shows that children's reading scores got worse, with average end of year reading scores 3 to 6 percentile points lower than pre-pandemic levels (Lewis et al., 2021). The overall goal of this project is to uncover the mechanisms through which COVID-19 has and will have short-term and long-term impacts on children's reading skills. We use a risk-resilience model as the framework for this project, which recognizes children have varying levels of risk factors that make them more or less likely to be affected by COVID-19 related disruptions to their sources of resiliency. We will capitalize on an existing active national twin project, the National Project on Achievement in Twins (NatPAT). NatPAT has already enrolled a cohort of 1801 pairs of twins (and growing) and has been tracking them as they progress through elementary school, collecting their reading progress monitoring data three times a year. We will continue to enroll twins into NatPAT using our successful and established recruitment procedures, and collect their ongoing reading data. In addition, every summer for all five years of the grant, any twin family with children in grades kindergarten to 6 will be mailed a survey packet to their homes. This packet will contain a parent and child survey with questionnaires related to their experiences over the last school year related to COVID-19 impacts, specifically their social interactions, health and economic status and changes, and their experiences with digital technology. Using methods that allow us to understand causal relations, we are uniquely situated to address the overall goal of the proposed research through three specific aims (SA). First, we will quantify the short and long-term effects that losing social resources due to COVID-19 has on reading skills (SA1). Second, we will quantify the short and long-term effects of COVID-19 related health and economic stressors on reading skills (SA2). Finally, we will quantify the short and long-term effects of the digital-divide on reading skills during COVID-19 (SA3).