Long-term assessment of hybrid period first graders’ reading and writing fluency

We assessed second-graders who were in the first-grade during COVID-19 school closures’ reading and writing fluency. We then investigated how hybrid instruction influenced these students’ literacy development after two years of uninterrupted in-person instruction. We compared 100 students from 15 schools based on their language background (monolingual vs. bilingual) and place of residence (village vs. urban center). We also predicted our second-phase data using first-phase data. Students read narrative and instructional texts for reading fluency. They copied a sentence repeatedly in the first phase and wrote a story in the second for writing fluency. In the first phase, many students struggled with reading, village students lagged urban students, and hybrid education hurt both monolinguals and bilinguals. In-person education significantly helped students who initially struggled with reading and writing. Additionally, early literacy performance in the first phase served as a strong predictor of later fluency, as evidenced by a simple regression analysis.