Okay, so to be clear you’re backing off the ‘immediate and direct’ bit because you realized it was dumb, right? The idea that you would measure the effects of interventions on education by their direct and immediate benefit or harm would get you laughed at in an education conference. Imagine coming up with a new curriculum and having people demand ‘but did the kid learn more THIS AFTERNOON?!’
As far as ‘more empirical’ goes, the paper goes on at considerable length, citing empirical research, as to how masking inhibits some behaviors well established to be associated with effective teaching. Most of this is common sense stuff (if it’s harder to understand the teacher it’s harder for them to teach you…duh) but I think the parts about communicating affect and how emotional connections and communication are also parts of learning that are inhibited is useful to know.
If you’re looking for a paper that says ‘mask wearing reduces math scores by x%’ it doesn’t exist, if for no other reasons than there’s been insufficient time and the list of confounding variables is going to be immense.
This is for the most part common sense though - mask wearing interferes with some of the behaviors that are trademarks of effective teaching and learning so the reasonable inference is that mark wearing means learning loss. Again, just ask any teacher if they think it makes it harder to do their job. The overwhelming majority will say yes, even if they support them!
This has been an ongoing problem for the last year or so at least, that people focus only on the virus and not the cost of the interventions themselves. If people want to make the argument that suppressing the virus is worth less effective schooling that’s fine, but to pretend there’s no trade off there is stupidity.
The word choice is very much correct because we have to establish exactly what evidence is being shown in your cited paper. I want to see exactly where this paper demonstrates the empiric evidence that masks result in very real harms. And you even agree such empiric evidence of direct or immediate harms doesn't exist. You claim masks
have harmful effects on students and now you admit there's actually no direct or immediate evidence of such. Its important for everyone to know that your argument isn't based on real empiric evidence that masks do have a harm but is based on conjecture.
But the rest of your response is really telling. If this paper actually showed the empiric evidence behind your claim, it would be very easy to provide all of us in this thread following along, exactly where the paper supports your claims. The statements. The references. The empiric studies. Please enlighten all of us, since you are reading something into this paper, what these first two sections cover as an illustrative example for everyone reading along:
4. Face masks impair face recognition and face identification
5. Face masks impair verbal and non-verbal communication
The author provides no evidence that facemaks in the educational setting leads to negative student outcomes. Ok... fine... so does the author provide us any empiric evidence that to what level face recognition or face identification matters in older children in the educational setting? All the author discusses is evidence in infants. How does this even apply to schools? Even if this was somehow a problem, the author even provides an easy mechanism to fix this issue in his very last paragraph in this section.
Similarly for the next section, how does the possible impairment of "verbal and non-verbal communication" lead to less "effective teaching," and thus a harm to students? Where's this empiric evidence? Is it considerable or negligible? The author admits that impact on verbal communication could be either "negligible" or "considerable." Why should we believe it is considerable and not negligible? Even the author of the paper refuses to make any claims here.
So... since this paper was supposed to be "more empirical," where does this paper show empiric evidence of masks having harmful effects on students???