• Journal of Science Education
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.251-262
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• 2023

In this study, we examine other factors that may contribute to the decline in students' academic performance and educational attainment. Many media reports, as well as previous studies, have suggested that virtual learning is the main reason for the decline in students' academic performance. However, the 2020 National Student Achievement Survey, which was conducted in conjunction with the COVID-19 Distance Learning Environment Student Survey, showed that students were highly satisfied with distance learning (70-80%), and the analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Achievement showed that students' academic performance had already been declining year by year since 2017, with a general downward curve. For further confirmation, we analyzed the performance of high school students on mock exams and found that their performance was not normally distributed, but rather a right-skewed U-shaped distribution with a shrinking number of medians and severe polarization. We found that this phenomenon is not simply because of the mode or quality of the virtual classroom, but to a variety of factors, including environmental influences such as care and management at home, changes in investment in private education, increased time spent on online devices while taking virtual classes at the bottom, and increased time spent watching online content, games, and videos that are not related to learning.