How Was Reading Comprehension Affected Due to the Pandemic?

Understanding a text goes beyond just reading; it is a mental process through which we have to assimilate, think, reason, and give meaning to everything reviewed.

How Was Reading Comprehension Affected Due to the Pandemic?
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One of the most severe problems facing our Mexican educational system is the lack of reading comprehension, which affects all areas of knowledge, such as mathematics, logic, history, biology, Spanish, and others. In the case of middle school students who have not developed this skill, it is difficult for them to study autonomously because they cannot understand what they read optimally, nor can they read any text, generating apathy towards this activity. Therefore, reading comprehension remains one of the essential linguistic processes to advance learning. It is important to review and innovate the pedagogical practices we employ in the classroom to develop this competency.

The ravages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic greatly affected our students’ learning on top of the lags they had already experienced. Millions of children and adolescents worldwide could not attend school; the luckiest attended classes virtually. Experts say that the pandemic caused this century’s most significant educational setback, as proposed by Dr. Fernando Reimers, Director of the Global Educational Innovation initiative at the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University (UdeG, 2020).

The pandemic’s consequences for the development of educational competencies

According to the report issued by INEGI (2021) in Mexico, the pandemic left 5 million students out of school because they did not have the economic resources to continue. These consequences were evidenced by increased child labor, school dropouts, child marriages, and other abuses.

In March 2022, the Executive Director of UNICEF, Catherine Russel, commented in a press release, “When children cannot interact with their teachers and peers directly, their learning suffers. The loss can be permanent when they can’t interact with their teachers and peers through any means.”

Likewise, Bibiam Díaz is an education specialist in the Vice Presidency for Sustainable Development office at CAF (Development Bank of Latin America). Assures that In the short term, the effects on learning will be devastating, and strong increases in school dropouts and the deepening of the already existing socioeconomic gaps are expected, especially for students who come from families with fewer resources. Not only will there be significant decreases in the development of basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics, but in the general development of children, who access health and food services through schools” (Diaz, 2021).

The most worrying thing is the school dropout rate due to the economic situations in some homes, causing the students to leave school to assume economic roles inappropriate to them, integrating at an early age into the productive workforce to contribute to their homes. It interrupts their development and results in fewer possibilities for a quality life both personally and professionally in the future.

Reading comprehension is a topic of utmost international importance. Continuous research, events, and congresses address it. In December 2021, the Sixth Educational Conference on Reading Education was organized by the Spanish Association of Reading Comprehension (CIVEL). The main objective was to discuss the latest research regarding reading comprehension, such as reading from the linguistic and literary perspective, the literary approach, and the promotion of reading from the didactic, pedagogical, and psychological points of view, among many others, to serve as support for researchers, teachers, and the students themselves.

Proposal for the development of reading competency

In the January-May 2022 semester, I gave my students an activity that I can say had successful results. In the third semester of Communication and Art, the students had to develop reading competency “to acquire knowledge and evaluate information from various written texts.” At this level, students are expected to obtain reading appreciation, specifically, reading levels: literal, information reorganization, inferential, critical, and reading appreciation. Thus, it was necessary to implement an activity where students could practice each level until reaching the highest.

Below, I describe this activity:

  1. Each student was assigned a period of literature: Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, Realism, Neoclassicism, Modernism, or Avant-garde. In each period, they had to investigate and identify the years, century, and place it developed and describe its various contexts (economic, political, religious, social, etc.).
  2. They researched some representatives of this period of the literature, chose a relevant text, and integrated a brief analysis of their works.
  3. To finish this activity, the students had to identify how the period’s social, political, economic, and religious aspects affected the artist’s elaboration. They had to explain how the artist was influenced by his time and how he captured it in his work.
  4. They were asked to present their research to their peers using visual aids and argue the conclusions of their research.

As we can see, in this activity, they practiced all reading comprehension levels, starting with recognizing, locating, and identifying elements, details, cause-effect relationships, and character traits. They had to categorize places, people, and objects and schematically reproduce and synthesize the text.

Finally, they made inferences and judgments about reality and fantasy, values, and logical relationships. Likewise, they explained their inferences from the chosen text: temporal, contextual, and spatial relationships, vocabulary ambiguities, and the relationships between the sentence elements, and they argued their presentations.

Additional technological tools for developing reading competency

CANVA is a simplified graphic design tool software and website that presents 80 reading comprehension exercises we can use with our students in class. We can create attractive exercises if we need a specific topic corresponding to their respective activities. In addition, it provides fascinating information regarding aspects and skills to advance in the different reading comprehension levels.

To be good readers and develop reading skills, our students do not need to read texts just for reading. They must learn to obtain information, infer, question, criticize and thus make judgments and form their ideas and arguments. When all of the above is achieved, they have the possibility that knowledge remains in their long-term memory to help them relate to various sources and thus create new knowledge. Understanding a text goes beyond just reading. It is a mental process by which we assimilate, think, reason, and give meaning to everything reviewed. It also influences the practice of each student reading texts and their previous knowledge.

Internationally, Mexico is the last among the OECD countries in reading comprehension assessments. It is worrying because this aspect impacts everything in learning. The problem is real and severe. If we continue like this, we cannot escape our educational pothole.

I invite readers to reflect on our responsibility and urgency to implement innovative strategies that enable students to develop competencies at different reading comprehension levels. Achieving the above, we can form free, prepared, critical citizens capable of solving situations in differentiated contexts, with self-taught abilities, correct language development, excellent communication, and other aspects that would be the subject of another article.

I would like to know your opinions and comments regarding this topic below in the comments section. 


About the author

Luisa Guillermina Ramírez Mazariegos (luisag.ramirez@itesm.mx) teaches Communication, Literature, Spanish Language, and Art and Culture in the Department of Humanities at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Hidalgo campus. She has a Ph.D. in Education. She has written some books on Reading Comprehension and Leadership for the directors of educational institutions and various articles related to Reading Comprehension, Leadership, Competency-Based Teaching, and others. She is currently working on NOVUS projects related to spelling by visualization.

References

Canva (2022). “80 ejercicios de comprensión lectora” Accessed at https://www.canva.com/es_mx/aprende/80-ejercicios-comprension-lectura/

Diaz, B. (March 21, 2021). “Educación en pandemia: ¿un año perdido para América Latina?” Accessed at https://www.caf.com/es/actualidad/noticias/2021/03/educacion-en-pandemia-un-ano-perdido-para-america-latina/

Reimers, F. (May 6, 2020). Webinar “El aprendizaje de los niños en tiempos de encierro” (@canal44tv) Accessed at https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/fernando-reimers

Russell, C. (March 22, 2022). “Alerta Unicef por retrocesos en educación tras 2 años de pandemia” El comentario. Universidad de Colima. Accessed at https://elcomentario.ucol.mx/alerta-unicef-por-retrocesos-en-educacion-tras-2-anos-de-pandemia/

Salinas, C. (March 23, 2021). Reporte INEGI “De acuerdo con el reporte emitido por INEGI (2021) en México, la pandemia ha dejado a 5 millones de estudiantes fuera de la escuela”. Accessed at https://elpais.com/mexico/2021-03-23/la-pandemia-deja-a-cinco-millones-de-estudiantes-fuera-de-la-escuela-en-mexico.html


Edition by Rubí Román (rubi.roman@tec.mx) – Edu bits and Webinars Editor – “Learning that inspires” – Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education of Tec de Monterrey.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.


Profe Luisa
Luisa Guillermina Ramírez Mazariegos

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