Young students in Morocco fell behind in their reading skills to a concerning degree after schools closed in response to COVID-19, and they may require many years of remedial instruction to attain learning standards, according to research by the USAID-funded Reading for Success – National Program for Reading.

Fortunately, the findings from Morocco come with encouraging signs: Although younger primary-school students experienced “disturbing” declines in reading skills, the loss in learning was milder among older primary-school students who had been taught longer under a modernized Arabic language curriculum that emphasizes phonics-based instruction, interactive teaching and student engagement.

In another encouraging note, the research found that educators in Morocco are open to novel approaches to remediation, such as grouping students by skill level rather than by age or creating a hybrid catch-up program that takes place in school and at home.

“COVID has been a disaster for every country around the world. We’re all facing the same problems,” said Karen Tietjen, Creative’s Principal Technical Advisor for Education. “But my knowledge of Morocco tells me that you have tools in place, and that what you need to do is organize targeted brainstorming sessions to craft a national program for school directors, supervisors, and parents so they can systematically help students with learning loss.”

Comprehension skills declined during closures

To measure the impact of the closure of schools in 2020, researchers from Creative Associates International and Management Systems International compared test results from February 2020, just before the closure, and October 2020, after the resumption of in-person instruction, for 641 students in first through fourth grades in 12 schools in three regions of Morocco (Oriental, Rabat-Sale-Kenitra, and Souss-Massa).

This allowed researchers to see how the students’ reading skills changed during the period of lockdown, when a limited amount of distance learning was available and parents were asked to encourage reading. They found:

• Results showed overall gains in reading fluency, measured by the number of correct words per minute the student read aloud from a grade-level text passage. However, the gains were disproportionately among high-performing students.
• Students suffered declines in higher-level skills such as comprehension, grammar, and writing. In an exception, fourth-graders’ ability in listening comprehension improved during the closure.
• Students in predominantly lower-income rural areas were more likely to fall behind in reading skills during the closure of schools than students in largely higher-income urban areas.

Lingering psychological effects

Interviews with students and teachers in October 2020 suggested that feelings of isolation and anxiety from the closure period lingered after the resumption of classes. According to the researchers, this points to the need for additional services addressing students’ mental and emotional well-being. The study revealed:

• More than 50 percent of students said they were sometimes but not always able to solve their problems. About 20 percent of students said they were never able to solve their problems, and about 20 percent said they were always able to solve their problems.
• About 50 percent of students said they sometimes but not always can find someone to talk to when they need help. About 10 percent of students said they never can find someone to talk to when they need help, and about 40 percent said they always do.

“In the classroom, teachers noted a lack of focus, attention, and lesson participation among students, as well as psychological and behavioral issues such as lack of discipline, fear, distrust of others, violent or aggressive behavior, and introversion or extreme timidity,” Tietjen said. “These findings suggest the need for psychosocial support and socio-emotional learning responses…to mitigate students’ feelings of anxiety” as the pandemic continues to disrupt school schedules, she added.

Attempts by the Moroccan government and schools to continue instruction during the closure through distance learning achieved mixed results:

• While 60 percent of first- through fourth-graders said they watched the short daily televised lessons broadcast by the Moroccan government, a correlated improvement in reading fluency was seen only in first- and second-graders.
• Having and reading books at home was linked to an improvement in reading fluency only in first-graders.
• Parental support, although reported by 81 percent of students, was found to have no effect on student learning, suggesting parents and students may benefit from more organized at-home learning activities.

Learning losses had not been overcome by the end of the 2020/2021 school year, which saw reduced class time, high teacher and student absenteeism rates, and occasional closures. In a larger study in June 2021 of the same grade levels and regions as well as Fez-Meknes Region, the researchers found:

• Primary school students’ oral reading fluency and reading comprehension in tests in June 2021 was significantly lower than counterparts tested in June 2018, according to Creative Associates’ Midline School Effectiveness Study of 7,085 first- through fourth-graders in 179 schools. The declines were “especially precipitous” among first- and second-graders, Tietjen said. For example, fluency at the syllable level among first-graders declined nearly 50 percent from 2018 to 2021 and more than 20 percent among second-graders.
• While third-graders scored somewhat lower in fluency and about the same in comprehension in 2021 as in 2018, fourth-graders suffered the least learning loss: Students tested in June 2021 scored almost as high in fluency and slightly higher in reading comprehension than those tested in June 2018.

Older students retained more

The more favorable results for older primary-schoolers reflect well on the effectiveness of Morocco’s new curriculum for reading, writing, and speaking in Arabic, which the Ministry of National Education has rolled out since 2018 with support from the USAID-funded Reading for Success–National Program for Reading (RFS-NPR) implemented by Creative.

“Why are upper grades showing less learning loss? It’s really that they have been exposed to higher dosage amounts of instruction using the new curriculum and pedagogical techniques,” Tietjen said in her presentation. “The longer the exposure to the new Arabic language program over time, the lower the learning loss, with even a modest increase for grade four students.”

Third and fourth-graders were taught under the new curriculum throughout their schooling. By contrast, first- and second-graders had little exposure to the new curriculum before the pandemic.

“Students in the upper grades who have been exposed to the program a little bit longer but also who have been in school longer are performing better than students who either started school during the pandemic or had a substantial part of their schooling history so far impacted by COVID,” said Gaëlle Simon, Practice Area Lead for Education at MSI. “Students in the lower grades, their learning was most affected by COVID. So, there is absolutely a need to focus on students in the lower grades and making sure that we reduce that gap.”

The Moroccan government’s Arabic language curriculum revised with RFS-NPR assistance, a response to Morocco’s longstanding struggle with low literacy, empowers teachers to accelerate children’s acquisition of language skills through phonics-based instruction; highly interactive activities such as storytelling, movement, and role-playing; and hands-on projects in which students apply reading and writing skills while researching topics related to the study units.

In addition to revising the curriculum, Creative worked with the Ministry to create instructional materials, train educators in their use, and strengthen educators’ ability to accommodate different learning levels and assess progress.

Remediation needs and solutions

Although the curriculum allots a review session every six weeks, the researchers concluded that those will not be sufficient to overcome the pandemic learning losses and that extra remediation activities are “acutely” needed, especially for the earliest grades. Educators face difficult choices such as reducing the time for some subjects in order to prioritize foundational subjects, such as reading and math; extending the school day or year; and offering catch-up classes after school or during the summer.

In focus group discussions, teachers, principals, and supervisors (inspectors) agreed on the value of grouping students by skill rather than grade. Those educators also agreed on the importance of providing guidance to parents on how to catch up at home. Creative Associates’ Tietjen recommended a structured approach to at-home remediation under which parents and students receive orientation and materials for distance/at-home learning.

Estimating how long students will need remedial instruction to regain learning levels before the COVID-19 crisis, the researchers pointed to the U.S. example of Hurricane Katrina: After missing four months of school because of that natural disaster, students in the New Orleans area needed remediation for two years before they caught up to learning standards. By comparison, COVID-19 has cost Moroccan students more than twice that – an estimated nine and a half months – taking into account closures and the reduction in instructional time when classes resumed.

“The really good news is that the Ministry already has a lot of tools at its disposal,” Tietjen said. “The inspectors can help guide teachers. Most of them have training and know the new curriculum. Parents are trying to help. What it would take is some organized thought and work in order to structure a more systematic approach.”

Educators worldwide have spent two years creatively tending to their students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether by teaching over Zoom or broadcasting lessons over the radio, they have not given up on education.

USAID’s Reading for Success – National Program for Reading (NPR) in Morocco has put this same commitment and energy into training teachers despite pandemic hurdles.

The Moroccan Ministry of Education, Preschools and Sports and the Reading for Success programs spent seven years creating a revised Arabic language curriculum to improve literacy in primary school. However, the curriculum’s full potential can only be reached after it is in teachers’ hands and being deftly applied in classrooms.

Fortunately, the USAID Morocco program had already planned to integrate digital solutions and was able to expand them when the pandemic made in-person teacher training impossible.

“As the proverb goes, ‘in every curse there is a blessing’,” says Abdelaziz Abdelhadi,

Director of Zouhair Ibn Abi Salma School in El Hajeb. “The COVID-19 pandemic pushed us to introduce more distance training opportunities.”

The primary tool the program relied on was massive open online courses, also known as MOOCs, which offer an online way to provide high-quality, flexible coursework to an unlimited number of teachers.

It introduces the revised Arabic language curriculum through training videos, class simulations and other useful tools to educators across Morocco.

“Teachers learn the theoretical concepts, and at the same time they have the opportunity to see how the skill is being taught to students,” says Abdellatif Fergoug, Head of the Ministry of Education’s E-learning Project. “We provided them with both theoretical and practical tools to learn.”

Beyond serving as a pandemic solution, MOOCs have made it easier for teachers to avail of professional development.

“Remote training is flexible,” says Mohamed Housni, Head of Division at the National Center for Educational Innovations and Experimentation (CNIPE) e-learning center, an institution in Rabat that collaborated on creating the MOOCs. “You can be at home, in a café or at work and access the platform to participate in these trainings at your own convenience.”

This flexibility is critical for female teachers, who have shared that they sometimes have difficulty attending in-person trainings due to family responsibilities or their husbands not wanting them to travel alone.

Khadija Chahid has been an educator for eight years, but the MOOCs were the first curriculum training she received since graduating from college.

“This was my first time teaching grade two, and the Arabic language curriculum completely changed,” says Chahid. “The MOOC helped me learn new concepts to better teach reading. If I had tried to learn this on my own, I wouldn’t have been able to understand as much as I do now.”

This is thanks to thoughtful preparation by the National Program for Reading, the Ministry, CNIPE and the Center of Learning Technologies at Al Akhawayn University.

These collaborators drew on neuroscience principles — attention, active engagement and anchoring — to create an engaging training for teachers and produce corresponding videos. The team found creative pandemic workarounds to continue producing remotely, including training people on how to record videos at home.

While MOOCs have proven to be powerful tools, there is still a desire for a blended approach that optimizes flexibility with the magic that happens when learners are in a room together.

“Ever since we began pursuing remote training, we have been saying that our role is not to compensate for in-person training,” says Housni. “Our work is complementary.”

The MOOCs trained 339 teachers from pilot schools in four regions in Morocco from September 2021 to January 2022. The platform that hosts the MOOCs will eventually be opened nationwide to train thousands of teachers.

“These courses can help us train more than 40,000 teachers,” says the Ministry’s Director of Curricula, Fouad Chafiqi, Ph.D. “Today these 40,000 teachers are learning about the Arabic language curriculum but maybe in the future it will be other subjects and we can foster a culture of lifelong learning.”

A project supported by the United States to strengthen literacy in primary schools in Morocco is also providing new opportunities to teach children about climate change and other urgent environmental challenges. While revamping Morocco’s curriculum for teaching young children to read and write in Arabic, the Reading for Success–National Program for Reading (NPR) added units to familiarize children in first through sixth grade with global warming, water pollution, threats facing forests and oceans, and energy conservation.

As the curriculum strengthens skills in reading, writing, and speech through audio, text, and participatory learning, the units provide compelling topics that help students consider their own relationships with water, forests, wildlife, and energy use. The units culminate in a project that makes students feel personally engaged with seeking solutions.

At Al-Resala Primary School in Ait Melloul, sixth-graders’ hands darted up as their teacher, Hamid Ait Barka, explained the requirements for their project on global environmental challenges such as climate change and pollution. Ait Barka said students have connected personally with the environmental content. “The students’ interaction was very positive because of the importance of the topic and through their sense of the dangers threatening the environment,” Ait Barka said.

After Ait Barka taught a new lesson on waste management, 11-year-old student Yasmina Sayeh submitted a project describing how to repurpose waste items for further use. The experience gave Yasmina a greater sense of her accountability for protecting nature and a feeling of empowerment, her mother Samia El Hirech said. “In the beginning, my daughter didn’t know the meaning of recycling,” El Hirech said. “She learned that we could produce perfect and valuable things from used items. Now she knows that recycling can help us in our daily life and is beneficial for preserving nature, and it enhances our sense of responsibility in maintaining nature.”

As an educator, Ait Barka said he was energized to work with the urgently relevant material. “This type of teaching puts teachers at the heart of life problems,” he said. “The new curriculum provides the right setting with all of the resources – reading, oral, and written expression, in addition to unit projects.”

In the coastal city of Inezgane, climate awareness is also at the heart of learning. Third-grade teacher Nadia Rochdi used the new instructional material to show her students that taking care of their local surroundings is a microcosm of caring for the natural environment. Rochdi used the materials for hands-on learning as her students cared for plants, painted pictures about the environment, and staged a play and an art exhibit. “The new curriculum contains different activities that raise students’ awareness of the importance of preserving the environment. This reflects positively in their behavior and the way they interact with it,” Rochdi said. “I am happy about that and wish that the Ministry would duplicate its efforts regarding this important topic, especially with all the challenges and the climate changes of our planet.”

The NPR project, which launched in 2017 and is set to be completed in 2022, is supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in cooperation with Morocco’s Ministry of National Education with technical assistance from Creative Associates International.

Mounya El-Asri contributed to this article.