Controversies behind COVID learning loss: Historical issues, current measurements, and future strategies

ABSTRACT COVID learning loss has sparked fierce debate among stakeholders in education. There are debates among concerned educators about ways to understand learning loss reports, methods to measure learning loss, and strategies to recover from learning loss. In this article, we unpack opposing perspectives on these three controversies with the goal of extracting useful recommendations to guide post-pandemic education revival. Drawing from structural inequity theory, this article reviews the controversies through historical, current, and future lenses respectively: (1) Should we be talking about differential COVID learning loss? (2) Are we measuring COVID learning loss appropriately? and (3) Which recovery plans should we prioritize to address COVID learning loss? Within each controversy, the article makes suggestions on how practitioners may make sense of each controversy and integrate take-aways from them into their work.