From 2020, the year of Covid, to today, Como students of all levels of education – from elementary to high school – have had a drop in performance, especially in Italian and mathematics, while their performance in English has held up well. This is the picture drawn by the results of the Invalsi tests, taking into consideration the results from the pre-pandemic school year, therefore 2018/2019, to 2022/2023. A situation that reflects the national one and which would be the result of the effects of isolation and distance learning that children and young people have had to face, with consequences that they still carry with them today. Poor ability to concentrate, reduced vocabulary, greater psychological fragility: this is what teachers find in many students.
«It is now well established that Covid has had effects, it is a long wave that we will slowly reabsorb – comments the superintendent Giuseppe Bonelli – There has been a decline, but the score has not dropped in a disheartening way. After all, I don’t know what the alternative could have been: during the pandemic we did what we could. If we hadn’t even been dads, the results would have been worse. Learning is a community process, if you do it individually it doesn’t have the same result, you learn together, not in front of the PC. We are carrying out recovery activities against school dropouts, for the orientation and personalization of learning also thanks to the Pnrr which has allocated almost 10 billion to education”. And he adds: «We are at an acceptable level of skills. Who could have improved their performance in those conditions? Another aspect to take into consideration is the psychological distress that we continue to record, not only in children. It’s like coming out of a war. However, let’s also look at the good things: English data have improved a lot over the years, and through social media the use of the foreign language is greater than in the past.” According to many teachers, Covid has brought to light problems that were already there before. «We have noticed fragility in basic skills, such as reading comprehension and writing – highlights Francesca Ciclitera, teacher of Literature at the Prestino comprehensive institute –. Covid has certainly complicated a situation that was already difficult before. Kids don’t read anymore and have a very poor vocabulary, if we don’t force them to read, they don’t. They communicate smartly without punctuation and spelling and translate this into exercises at school. There are classes that are increasingly weak on basic skills, many arrive in sixth grade with great difficulty reading or have never written a short essay. Everything becomes more complex. It’s difficult to keep them engaged, today they have more and more problems with concentration and attention.”
«The pandemic has brought about quite a few problems, even different from those that existed before – adds Antonio Pulignano, mathematics teacher at the Volta high school -. Being isolated from other teenagers, forced into the house made many kids suffer and then many things dragged on, with consequences that still have consequences today. These are the years in which character is formed: being closed in the house, without comparison with others has negative effects. We noticed the decline in mathematics, but there were objective difficulties in distance learning.”
