Assessing the links between risk and resilience factors, school disruptions, and learning losses in reading

PROJECT SUMMARY School closures and disruptions to instruction can have long-term impacts on children’s progress towards becoming successful readers (Miller & Hui, 2022). Learning to read is crucial, as reading is a critical indicator of lifetime earnings, general health, and wellbeing (OECD, 2012). Many children are already at risk for reading difficulties, with only 35% of U.S. fourth graders showing proficient levels of reading ability (NCES, 2019). These reading difficulties can be magnified by disruptions to learning, with each day of closure linked to a 0.011 standard deviation decrease in literacy scores (Luo & Xu, 2025), particularly among elementary students (Weir, 2019). Our preliminary data shows that disruptions to schooling have had an immediate impact on children’s reading skills with potentially cascading effects. The overall goal of this project is to uncover the mechanisms through which unplanned school disruptions have short-term and long-term impacts on children’s reading skills. We use a risk-resilience model as the framework for this project, which recognizes children have varying levels of risk factors that make them more or less likely to be affected by disruptions to their sources of resiliency. We will capitalize on an existing active national twin project, the National Project on Achievement in Twins (NatPAT). NatPAT has already enrolled a cohort of 1997 pairs of twins (and growing) and has been tracking them as they progress through elementary school, collecting their reading progress monitoring data three times a year. We will continue to enroll twins into NatPAT using our successful and established recruitment procedures, and collect their ongoing reading data. In addition, every summer for all five years of the grant, any twin family with children in grades kindergarten to 6 will be mailed a survey packet to their homes. This packet will contain a parent and child survey with questionnaires related to their experiences over the last school year related to school disruptions, specifically their social interactions, health status and changes, and their experiences with digital technology. Using methods that allow us to understand causal relations, we are uniquely situated to address the overall goal of the proposed research through three specific aims (SA). First, we will quantify the short and long-term effects that losing social resources due to school disruptions has on reading skills (SA1). Second, we will quantify the short and long-term effects of school disruption related health stressors on reading skills (SA2). Finally, we will quantify the short and long-term effects of the digital-divide on reading skills as a result of school disruptions (SA3).