The Changes of Writing Skills By: Mallory March

Introduction

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning has significantly changed how well children can write. However, some students may have been positively affected by this, meaning they performed drastically better from home than in person. After COVID-19, it showed that students write better in person or online at their own pace, since many students need support from their teachers. Even though the majority of students suffered, these setbacks severely restricted their ability to write for their academic career. Many students who were enrolled in online courses hurried through tasks without giving the content their full attention, concentrating simply on getting the mark they had to pass. Or most schools allowed you to finish the year with the previous grades before COVID-19 occurred. This allowed students to essentially give up on their performance and only move onto the next year. As assignments were turned in online, there were fewer chances to use what was learned online correctly in paper. What I mean by this is, there were fewer assignments being given as well as less criticism given by teachers. Because of this, students lost the flow in strengthening their skills in creating a structured paper. In 2021, students returned to school wearing masks and practicing social distancing. There were also hybrid classes due to building capacity which only made learning harder and confusing to the student since it wasn't normal before COVID-19. With this, students' skills of writing and comprehension throughout their assignments only decreased. Missing months in a regular class setting with instruction caused students to struggle with grammar, sentence structure and organization. This resulted in long term disconnection, where students face challenges with writing assignments from a poor foundation of reading and writing skills.

Summary #1

Deborah K. Reed, along with Jing Ma and Hope K. Gerde, argues that students' writing performance declined following COVID-19 school closures. The study, "Resiliency and Vulnerability in Early Grades Writing Performance During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” clearly explains how school closures hurt students' writing skills. In this study, research was found and recorded on first and second graders writing before and after the pandemic related disruptions. It was observed that first graders' writing skills declined the most so then became less organized and planned out. Whereas second graders had more success in grammar but showed decline as well mainly in the category of structuring their ideas. The study came to a conclusion that in some aspects of writing remaining strong like grammar through the delay, missing in person classroom sessions had a negative effect on the most important parts of writing skills being organization and presentation. The study emphasizes the necessity of education that focuses on both the technical and additional components of writing in order to rebuild students' skills.

Summary #2

The study, “The Long Term Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Children's Writing: a Follow up Replication Study” that is written by Gustaf B. Skar and Steve Graham both support the argument of COVID-19s effect on students' ability to successfully write a paper. They investigate thoroughly how students, specifically children's writing skills are affected over time. To be particular, the study contrasts writing skills, handwriting precision. It also looked at the mindsets of Norwegian second graders after the pandemic and compared them to students tested before the pandemic. The follow up study found that by the end of second grade, the learning gaps that were being shown disappeared, despite the declines from the first grade caused by the sudden change to online schooling and loss of support. This shows that writing performance has improved since going back to in person learning.

Points of Agreement #1

Few studies have specifically looked at how the pandemics interruption influenced students' writing skills and growth, despite the fact that most studies have focused on how the pandemic has had an effect on reading and math skills. The studies, “Resiliency and vulnerability in early grades writing performance during the COVID-19 pandemic” and “The Long Term Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Children's Writing: a Follow up Replication Story” provides insightful evidence and information on how closure of schools connected to COVID-19 changed students' ability to write a successful paper. Firstly, Reed et al. provided important intel of their own experiment by comparing writing samples from first and second graders before and after the pandemic without any instruction and support by their teachers in person. Reed et al. studied whether students' writing ability changed after the pandemic by asking a descriptive research question: “ In what ways did the unscorable response of students in Grade 1 and 2 differ before as compared to after pandemic related school closure?” With this study, it was taken into account that during the 6 months of school closure, it was reported that there was a lack of support or direction given by teachers in person (Reed et al.). According to the study, students evaluated after the pandemic shutdown performed noticeably worse in important writing areas such as organization, grammar, and mechanics. Reed et al. argues that COVID-19 school closures significantly harmed early writing development, noting that many first graders submitted “unscorable responses or responses at the lowest rating.,” which showed “ there was a considerable drop in performance across all five writing traits.” (Reed et al.). Similarly, Skar et al. found gaps when comparing second graders tested during the pandemic to those who tested before it, suggesting that the disruption affected writing progress. Reed et al. further emphasizes that students “still performed significantly lower than second graders in the previous year,” supporting the idea that the effects were long lasting. However, while Reed et al. focuses on the continued learning gaps, Skar et al. also highlights that students showed improvement after returning to in person instruction, indicating signs of recovery over time. In addition, Skar et al. explains that, “ the interruption of in class teaching in schools resulted in loss of learning time for students,” reinforcing Reed et al. claim that reduced instructional time played a key role in declining performance. Together, both studies agree that the pandemic initially had a negative impact on students' writing skills due to the sudden loss of instruction and practice in person during a critical learning period, even though they differ slightly in how lasting those effects were.

Points of Disagreement 

There are many differences between the two sources of Reed et al. and Skar et al. of how they found and applied their research to the topic of COVID-19 effect on students ability to write. Reed et al. focuses closely on specific writing traits, such as organization, grammar, mechanics, and concentration, explaining that “Our main analysis relied upon students' trait level scores to better depict the nature of changes in their performance.” By analyzing these detailed trait level scores, Reed et al. concluded that although there was an initial decline, students showed measurable improvement after returning to in person instruction. In fact, they state “ A three level longitudinal model analyzing the sample of students moving from first to second grade in fall 2020 revealed significant improvements,” suggesting that writing skills began to recover. In contrast, Skar et al. examined broader aspects of writing, including overall text quality, handwriting fluency and students' attitude toward writing. While Reed et al. emphasize improvement, Skar et al. found that some negative effects continued. Particularly for certain groups of students. For example, they explain that “students learning to speak Norwegian evidenced more negative COVID-19 outcomes than native Norwegian speakers on the handwriting fluency and writing quality measures,” showing that not all students recovered at the same rate. With this, both Reed et al. and Skar et al. found their evidence and conclusions and makes us think of how exactly students' writing skills have changed for the better or worse.

Strengths and Weaknesses of source #1

In Reed et al. analysis of COVID-19s effect on students' writing, the study has both strengths and weaknesses. While it provides proof of early learning disruptions, it also raises some concerns regarding contextual and long term effects unanswered. Reed et al. provides a research study where students were tested before and after COVID-19, which is a great piece to make the study stronger. Another strong piece to Reed et al. study is by presenting statistics of the students testing in each category. The grade level students were then called together by the lead trainer to settle differences, adjust the raters, and make any required revisions to the scoring manual. For randomly chosen batches of ten responses, raters who had not maintained at least 90 percent reliability were designated as the second independent scorer. (Reed et al.) The conclusion of this test was: In Grade 1, scoring reliability was high, ranging from 97% to 100%, and remained strong after adjusting for chance agreement. In Grade 2, reliability was lower, ranging from 88% to 98%, but still showed agreement across all writing skills (Reed et al.). This evidence provides Reed et al. study dependability by showing the outcome of testing proving that students' writing skills were affected from the pandemic. By evaluating particular writing skills using standardization evaluations and accessible, quantitative data Reed et al. reduces bias in their conclusions and increases the study's trustworthiness. The researchers provide solid proof to back up their findings regarding the effects of COVID-19 by directly comparing student writing samples from before and after the pandemic. As Reed et al. gave evidence and spoke on the effects of students ability to write successfully after covid, it remained with unintelligible and minimal writing. This let the audience know that what was being highlighted is how deeply the disruption of COVID-19 affected young learners' ability to express themselves in writing. This evidence encourages empathy by demonstrating not only lower results but also the actual difficulties students experienced. However Reed et al. also has some parts of the study that make it less reliable when limiting COVID-19s affects only young students of first and second graders which makes it difficult to generalize the statistics found to all students.

Strengths and Weaknesses source #2

Furthermore, Skar et al. also demonstrates both strengths and weaknesses in its research of the long term effects of COVID-19 on children's writing by contributing systematic comparison data, but there are also issues with the findings interpretation and the reliability of its findings. To begin with, a key strength from Skar et al. is its long term monitoring method, which enables researchers to investigate whether the effects of COVID-19 on students' writing remained or changed over time rather than depending on a single point in time. Skar et al. provides, “ In the prior study by Author Skar et al. (2022), a Before COVID-19 group of 1636 Norwegian first grade students completed assessments of writing quality, handwriting fluency, and attitude toward writing in May/June of 2019. The following year, a second cohort of 817 first grade students from the same schools completed identical writing assessments in May/June 2022” (Skar et al.). The study offers a more comprehensive and trustworthy picture of both early writing difficulties and later recovery by comparing cohorts across several years using consistent assessment techniques. Another strong aspect of this study is its use of analyzing standardized writing assessments and clear performance measures, which increases the reliability and trustworthiness of the source. “Skar et al. (2022) found that the During COVID-19 cohort of first grader Norwegian students had statistically lower scores on the three writing measures than the before COVID-19 cohort of first graders after variance due to school and student characteristics were controlled.” (Skar et al.) This consistent measurement allows for precise comparisons between pre-pandemic and the year students were disrupted with the pandemic which strengthens the sources reliability. However, the study has weaknesses which affect the trustworthiness of the source. One weakness of Skar et al. study is that it's focused on a specific national and educational context, which may limit how well the results apply to students in other nations or educational systems. Also, because the study focuses on early grade levels, its findings might not accurately represent how COVID-19 impacted the writing skills of older children. With all of this, Skar et al. study has both strengths and weaknesses which makes their source reliable but somewhat not as well.

Opinion

With examining both sources, “Resiliency and vulnerability in early grades writing performance during the COVID-19 pandemic” and “The Long Term Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Children's Writing: a Follow up Replication Story” gave me insight on how extensive the pandemic has affected students to this day and how their writing skills drastically changed from before the pandemic to after. Personally, in my experience I was in sixth grade when the world shut down, going from in person learning and support from teachers I lost many skills other than writing successfully. As I was only in sixth grade, I was still learning how to write a paper successfully which was never my strong suit and to this day I still struggle. However, I have gained more skills and recovered since the pandemics ended. With this, I believe that students are still recovering no matter the grade the pandemic hit and changed their outlook on learning and retaining skills.

Conclusion

In closing, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted students' ability to successfully write a paper, as both sources show, but they also differ in how long lasting and extensive those effects seem to be. Reed et al. discovered significant drops in early elementary students' writing performance across a number of multiple traits after pandemic related school closures showing that students produced shorter, less coherent and in many cases unintelligible writing compared with pre pandemic cohorts, highlighting a significant early learning loss in writing. However by the end of second grade, differences in writing quality, handwriting fluency, and attitudes toward writing were no longer statistically significant, according to the replication study published in Skar et al., indicating that students demonstrated resilience and recovery over ime. Together, these studies show that while COVID-19 did have an impact on students' writing skills, the degree and duration of those effects differ based on the context, age group, and assessment period.