The effects of covid-19 pandemic and Distance Learning on reading skills in typical readers children: a longitudinal study

Abstract

Due to covid-19 pandemic, in February 2020 Italian government decided to take action in order to reduce physical contact and contain the spread of the virus; among the other measures, face-to-face teaching was suspended. All along 2020 and for the major part of 2021 online teaching replaced face-to-face teaching. Teachers and parents were unprepared for this kind of didactic activities and online modality varied during the lockdown months and among different schools.  Different studies analyzed the outcome of these online modalities, mostly on pathological samples (Baschenis et al., 2021).  We conducted a longitudinal study in order to investigate whether online teaching had a negative effect on reading skills development in Italian children typical readers. We recruited forty-nine children from a primary school in Alessandria (Piedmont, Italy) and assessed their reading skills before (T1) and after (T2) covid-19 pandemic. All children with learning disabilities, cognitive and sensory impairments were excluded from our sample. Children attended third grade at T1 and fifth grade at T2. We evaluated reading speed, accuracy and comprehension; data from existing literature has been used to confront our sample with the population of children typical readers. We compared the results obtained at T1 and T2; our findings show that our sample reached the expected improvement in reading fluency. The subjects obtained a significant improvement in reading comprehension as well, but existing data are insufficient to determine if the improvement reached by our sample is the same as expected. Therefore, we can state that online teaching has not worsened reading skills development in typical readers.