Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Pandemic living is strange – although we’re still working and learning like has been the norm for decades at this point, we’ve had to find a myriad of different ways to keep each other safe whilst we’re doing it. And whilst working from home has largely been agreed by most businesses to have boosted employee productivity, it hasn’t been the same story across the board – and children and young people seem to be paying the price, especially those who learn and think differently.
Italy was one of the first countries in the world to implement lockdown procedures after the Covid-19 pandemic began to take hold, implemented first in the Lombardy and Padua regions and then spreading via growing viral hotspots to a national scheme. Children during this time had to adapt quickly to the idea of remote education, and many children with neurodiversities and learning difficulties found themselves feeling perhaps a little cut off from their in-school support systems- and, as new research from a collaborative project between Italian universities and the Ministry of Health suggests, it’s likely had an impact on their reading development.
The data gleaned by the project showed that during the March-April period of lockdown measures, the majority of students attended online live classes only twice a week and received study sheets and/or pre-recorded video lessons by teachers. In a few months time, by the May-June lockdown period, this had more than doubled to 80% of students attending online classes every day.
The study reported significant differences in response to this shift to online learning between subjects with dyslexia and those who showed no previous evidence of neurodiversity or literacy differences. A higher percentage of children with identified dyslexia reported difficulties in following online classes and managing their homework tasks, as well as some being observed to have ‘worsening’ skills in various tasks including reading, comprehension and mathematics.
Although 70-85% of children with dyslexia exhibited an improvement in their reading speed skills over the lockdown period, 59-63% didn’t reach the expected level of improvement that would be usual for this length of time in education (0.30 syllables per second for words; 0.15 syllables per second for non-words). Reading speed and accuracy were observed to have suffered across the board in the test group that had dyslexia, and when we consider the amount of children the world over with dyslexia and literacy differences whose educational experience has been altered by the Covid-19 pandemic, the picture it paints is an unhappy one when it comes to the literacy journey.
You can read the full research paper here for a more in-depth examination of the reading changes that occurred as a result of the lockdown in Italy, as well as check out one of our other stories about the real cost of remote education at our blog.
