Inside Our Mind

In our latest episode, Brian welcomes Dr. Megan Kuhfeld to the program for a discussion about COVID-related school closures and their effects on students.Megan is a research scientist at the not-for-profit organization NWEA. She seeks to understand students’ trajectories of academic and social-emotional learning and the school and neighborhood influences that promote optimal growth. Her work covers a range of topics, including longitudinal growth modeling, achievement gaps, and summer learning loss. Megan recently co-authored a research brief titled “The COVID-19 Slide: What summer learning loss can tell us about the potential impact of school closures on student academic achievement.” She also co-authored a new working paper, called “Projecting the potential impacts of COVID-19 school closures on academic achievement,” which built on the COVID Slide brief and highlighted the increased variability of student needs that schools will likely be seeing in the future.In her discussion with Brian, Megan provides an