Abstract:

After a one-year pandemic’s reality, the most common way adopted by the government in Italy to face this condition is a constant closure and opening of the main public activities, including schools.

At the beginning of this scenario, students have been forced to stay at home for three months, from about March 2020, to test a way of learning never experienced before: the distance learning.

Starting from this never seen fact, many researches have been done to understand topics like how teachers were trained for the use of learning technologies or how have students reacted to this new didactical method.

But the most relevant question that we wanted to inquire in our research is: what are the real effects that the long period of lockdown has generated to students? Has the absence from the school life contributed to decrease their level of knowledge and skills?

We already have many data which confirm that the consequences of the complete closure of schools and classes are mainly negative. Many teachers, in Italy, were not correctly trained to use didactical technologies, a lot of students were not equipped with digital tools and the action of the Government in this regard has not been prompt.

However, many schools have not the chance to make a comparison between the original level of knowledge of their students and the current situation, because of the lack of accurate data to analyze.

Fortunately, we do. In our research we compared information measured with a standardized test, the Test of Relational Concepts (TCR), developed to investigate the spatial-temporal skills on primary school’s pupils. This test was submitted to a sample of 55 students, split into three classes attending the first year of the “Scuola Primaria Marconi”, a primary school situated in Collegno, Turin (Italy), in 2018. The same tool was given to students from the same establishment, in 2020. The sample, this time, counted 60 pupils from three second year of primary school’s classes.

After the test’s administration, we made a statistical data analysis by checking the results of the standardized score and the percentile ranking. We started our research with the following hypothesis: the lockdown period which afflicted Italian schools from March to June 2020, has significantly contributed to the decline of children’s school skills, especially spatial-temporal ones.

We can affirm that the data we measured corroborate our assumption: the contrast between the 2018’s data and the 2020 ones is significant. We are talking about a standardized score’s average of 48,87 for students tested in 2018 and 44,46 for the 2020’s sample. We see the same condition for the percentile ranking: an average of 56,94 in 2018 and 31,66 in 2020.

Moreover, we compared those data with another sample composed of 397 students from pre-schools and primary schools of Collegno and Domodossola, two Italian cities in the region of Piedmont, examined in 2014, by the administration of the same test. The results are once again significant: we pointed out a standardized score’s average of 46,23 and a percentile ranking of 40,87. Both are higher than the 2020’s sample.

These details are crucial to have a tangible idea of the effects of an unusual event like a so long school closure. Our aim is to consider these findings as a starting point to plan a focused program, to give back to pupils their original expertise, right away.

Keywords:

Covid-19, Remote Learning, TCR, Spatial-temporal skills, Primary school's education.