Learning Loss, Equity, and Cognitive Capacity in the Pandemic Era

By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark

Editor’s Note: This is part one of a five-part series

As the 2020–21 school year began, remote learning became the default for most students across the United States, and conversations about equity intensified. Some state leaders moved to standardize remote instruction—for example, requiring an average number of hours of synchronous, or “live,” instruction per day—responding to the haphazard mix of approaches seen during the spring shutdown. That spring revealed dramatic contrasts: some schools and districts, including well-resourced college preparatory schools, shifted rapidly to a coordinated remote program for every grade; others offered minimal or no formal instruction, sometimes out of concern that unequal access would disadvantage students.

There is broad agreement among educators that many students made limited progress toward grade-level standards during the closure period. While informal and incidental learning certainly occurred, most students did not advance as expected in core subjects.

The COVID slide

Researchers and policy analysts have used the familiar concept of the “summer slide”—the learning regression that can occur when students are out of school—to model the pandemic’s impact. According to estimates from the Brookings Institution, the average student was entering the fall having lost roughly 30 percent of their expected reading progress and about 70 percent of their math progress from the previous school year. For students in the lowest-performing quartile, the setbacks in learning may have exceeded a full year.

Faced with this reality, school districts and educators are grappling with how to diagnose the damage and respond. Rather than simply asking “how far have we fallen,” we should also ask “where were we before the fall?” Understanding preexisting conditions is essential to designing equitable and effective recovery strategies.

Asking the right questions

Even before COVID-19 disrupted schooling, many American students were not meeting grade-level expectations. Prior to the pandemic, roughly 63 percent of fourth graders were reading below grade level and about 60 percent were below grade level in math. These aggregate numbers hide even larger and more persistent gaps for the most vulnerable groups, including students from low-income families, students with disabilities, and English language learners.

When schools abruptly closed and instruction shifted, many parents discovered firsthand how their children were performing. Reactions ranged from concern to shock and anger as families realized students were struggling with grade-level content in ways that had not been clearly communicated. Parents worry not only about immediate setbacks but about the long-term implications for their children’s careers, economic prospects, and well-being.

Education and the economy are deeply linked. When students do not reach proficiency, the effects ripple outward across society and the workforce.

Learning economics

Analyses of the pandemic’s economic consequences for education show that delays in restoring classroom instruction can have substantial economic effects. One analysis estimated that if students did not fully return to in-person schooling until fall 2021, the resulting drag on national productivity could approach $200 billion. That is a significant short-run impact.

However, preexisting achievement gaps have an even larger long-term economic cost. A pre-pandemic study by the OECD estimated that if average student performance in the United States rose to a minimum level of proficiency, the economy could gain an estimated $72 trillion over time. To put that in context, current U.S. GDP is around $20 trillion and global GDP about $80 trillion. Those comparisons underscore how much is at stake in raising overall student performance.

Why learning stalls: cognitive skills and variability

Teachers know every student learns differently. These differences reflect underlying brain-based processes—attention, working memory, processing speed, and auditory and visual discrimination—that enable learners to take in, organize, store, retrieve, and apply information. Collectively, these are cognitive skills, and each student has a unique cognitive profile of strengths and weaknesses.

Among cognitive processes, three executive functions—working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility—stand out for their influence on academic outcomes. Executive functions guide attention and self-regulation; they shape classroom behavior and are critical for successful reading and mathematics. They are also foundational to social-emotional learning and correlate with long-term outcomes such as lifetime earnings, health, and interactions with the criminal justice system.

Three groups of students face especially pronounced achievement gaps: economically disadvantaged students, students with learning disabilities, and English language learners. For these students, weak cognitive skills are often a key barrier to accessing and benefiting from instruction.

The effects of poverty on cognitive capacity

Research has increasingly shown that poverty affects cognitive development. Children raised in low-income environments frequently show delays in attention, working memory, and inhibitory control—the very executive functions that support learning. On average, students from poorer communities enter school academically and cognitively two to three years behind their peers. Placing a child whose cognitive development is one or two grade levels behind into a classroom with higher-grade expectations creates a persistent mismatch between instruction and readiness.

Learning disabilities further illustrate how underdeveloped cognitive processes impede academic progress. In the case of English language learners, the situation varies: there is no inherent cognitive deficit associated with speaking another primary language, and bilingualism can be an asset. Yet many English learners overlap with low-income populations, which means cognitive development issues can still be a factor for a substantial portion of this group.

Supporting this perspective, the OECD study found that measures of cognitive skills—not just years of schooling—are linked to economic growth. In other words, building cognitive capacity matters for both individual success and national prosperity.

An equity issue

If equity means ensuring every learner can access the education they need to succeed, then cognitive capacity is central to that goal. Access to devices, high-quality curriculum, and skilled teachers are necessary, but insufficient if students lack the cognitive tools to engage with and benefit from instruction. In this sense, strengthening cognitive skills is a core equity priority: without these underlying capacities, many students cannot fully use the resources we provide.

What would a solution look like? At minimum, it would include the ability to:

1. Understand each student’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses;
2. Remediate and strengthen weaker cognitive processes, while continuing to build on existing strengths;
3. Design learning environments—technology, instruction, and curriculum—that are informed by scientific evidence rather than folklore.

Addressing these elements is essential to making personalized learning truly effective and equitable.

Coming in part two of the series: Making personalized learning truly personal: How to determine each learner’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses.

About the authors

Betsy Hill is President of BrainWare Learning Company, an organization that applies neuroscience to build learning capacity. She is an experienced educator who has studied the connection between neuroscience and education and has served on academic boards. She teaches strategic thinking in an MBA program and holds a Master of Arts in Teaching and an MBA.

Roger Stark is Co-founder and CEO of BrainWare Learning Company. For more than a decade he has worked to bring comprehensive cognitive literacy training and assessment tools to a broad audience, leading development of an extensively researched online cognitive training product.

This article was originally published by The Learning Counsel, a research institute and news media hub focused on the transition to digital curriculum in education.