Education Continuity during COVID-19

Mapping a clear path through the Common Core Standards for educational leaders, teachers, parents and students.

COVID-19 has disrupted learning across the country. While some schools have implemented online learning, online learning is not universally accessible to all students.

Due to this disruption, many students will not be prepared for the next school year, or the year after next, when students are expected to build on learning outcomes they would have learned during this time.

At the Mapping Lab, we have applied our network modeling methodologies to the Common Core Standards to generate dynamic maps to be used for lesson planning, helping disadvantaged students learn and for curriculum re-organization.

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Analysis of COVID-19 Impact

The analysis here is based on an example syllabus from Cambridge Public Schools grade 6, but as school days do not vary widely, the analysis largely applies to all schools implementing the Common Core.

The numbers

• 27

  Direct Micro-outcomes impacted

• 36

  Downstream Micro-outcomes impacted

• 4

  Grade Bands impacted

For a student who is currently in Grade 6, this student will have 27 Micro-outcomes disrupted during the 2020 school year. Further on, the student will continue to have 36 Micro-outcomes disrupted as a result (from 7th Grade through the end of high school).

How we mapped the Common Core

The Common Core Math Standards consist of “Standards” (see Common Core Math) organized by grade bands K–High school.

Chunking up Common Core Standards

As a first step, for each Standard, we examined whether or not we could break them down into more fine-grained learning statements. These entities we call Micro-outcomes. For example:

Breaking up Standards in this way enables us to draw meaningful relationships between entities. For example, we can now meaningfully and precisely say that: State the formulas for the area and circumference of a circle is a prerequisite to Use formulas for the area and circumference of a circle to solve problems.

Drawing relationships between Micro-outcomes

Next, we drew has-prerequisite-of relationships between Micro-outcomes. This determination of whether or not a certain Micro-outcome requires another is a decision made by our subject matter experts.

This process results in a graph (or network) structure that is very powerful for analytics.

More detail on modeling, the decision-making process of drawing relationships and analytics methodology is given in our paper, Modeling COVID-19 disruptions via network mapping of the Common Core Mathematics Standards.

Next steps