By Mitchell Leister and Ana Flores

Academic performance dropped significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and students are not bouncing back. A study conducted by the Northwest Evaluation Association looked at test scores of students in grades 3-8 at 6.7 million U.S. public schools and found that current students are advancing slower than students prior to COVID. These students need 4.1 additional months of reading instruction and 4.5 months of math instruction on average to catch up to pre-pandemic levels of achievement.

One factor that may have contributed to students’ academic deficits during the pandemic was a shift from in-person to online learning. To rapidly adapt to COVID shutdowns, many schools across the country transitioned from classroom teaching to online platforms in an effort to help students continue learning. This strategy was believed to provide a comparable learning experience, but current results show that it was not. But why?

Another factor potentially influencing students’ decline in academic performance is what Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter calls “absent mindedness.” Absent mindedness is a type of forgetting that results from lapses in attention, often from “divided attention” that make it difficult for one to fully process information.

Despite the popularly held belief that we can multitask and perform multiple tasks succinctly and to satisfaction, several studies have shown that we exhibit poor memory and performance when our attention is........

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