During the corona pandemic, most schools were temporarily closed. A meta-analysis of 42 studies from 15 countries now shows how this affected the level of learning. According to this, the learning deficits make up an average of around a third of the learning value of a school year – and have not been made up for so far. Children with low socioeconomic status have the greatest deficits. The results thus confirm that the pandemic has exacerbated educational inequality in Germany and other countries.
According to the United Nations, more than 1.6 billion students in 190 countries were temporarily unable to go to school due to the Covid 19 pandemic. In many places, schools have established distance learning. The living room at home became a makeshift place of learning and the computer the interface for contact with teachers and classmates. However, children from low-income families in particular, who did not have a quiet learning environment at home and their own computer, often fell by the wayside.
Numerous studies from different countries around the world have already looked at how the corona pandemic has affected the level of learning. A team led by Bastian Betthäuser from the University of Sciences Po in Paris has now evaluated the results of 42 studies from 15 countries in a meta-analysis. Most of the included studies came from Great Britain and the USA, four came from Germany. Other countries considered were the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. All included studies were published between March 2020 and August 2022, allowing the authors to look at a total of 2.5 years of pandemic.
Math worse than reading
“Our analysis shows that students lost an average of 35 percent of the learning value of a school year as a result of the pandemic,” the authors report. “The learning progress of school-age children has slowed down significantly during the pandemic.” Betthauser and his colleagues found that the greatest deficits were already manifested in the first few months of the pandemic. “One might have thought that after teachers and families had time to adapt to the new learning conditions and after structures for online learning and reappraisal were put in place earlier, children would be able to catch up on the learning content lost at the beginning of the pandemic learning deficits had been created,” say the authors. However, the results indicate that the gaps in education that arose at the beginning of the pandemic did not widen significantly as the pandemic progressed, but have not yet closed again.
In math in particular, students built up large deficits during the pandemic, while their reading progress suffered less from distance learning. “This may be due to the fact that parents are better able to help their children with reading and that children improve their reading skills (but not their math skills) when they read for pleasure outside of school,” they suggest Betthauser and his colleagues. However, they found no differences between the grade levels. “One might expect that learning deficits in older children would be smaller than in younger ones, since older children may learn more autonomously and be better able to cope with a sudden change in their learning environment,” the authors write. However, this possible advantage was offset by the fact that in some countries older students were not allowed to attend school longer than younger ones.
Educational injustice worsened
The analysis also shows that the pandemic has exacerbated existing educational inequalities. First, learning gaps found in middle-income countries such as Brazil and Mexico, Colombia and South Africa were significantly larger than in high-income countries. The authors did not find any studies on low-income countries that they could include in the analysis. However, they assume that the pandemic has had even more devastating effects on school education there. “In low- and middle-income countries, economic resources, the availability of digital learning tools, and the ability of children, parents, teachers, and governments to support learning from home are lower,” the researchers explain.
On the other hand, even in high-income countries, the education of those children who were already having a hard time before the pandemic suffered. Children from families with a low socioeconomic status not only learned less during the homeschooling phase, they also have fewer resources to work through the missing learning content. Klaus Zierer from the University of Augsburg, who was not involved in the study, fears that a “Generation Corona” will form. “The lower the learning achievements, the more difficult it becomes for the learners to reach the standards required by the curricula,” he says. “This particularly affects the youngest in the system with an uneducated background from economically weak countries.”
Political action required
Targeted political measures are therefore important in order to compensate for the gaps in education. “We know from research that learning deficits unfortunately accumulate quickly and are therefore getting bigger and bigger. The sooner countermeasures can be taken, the better it is,” says Zierer. Summer schools are one possibility. “Studies have shown that they have a positive effect on all children and young people – but especially on learners from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds,” says Zierer. “Here could be benefited from the research and the existing concepts worldwide.”
Source: Benjamin Betthäuser (Science Po, Paris, France) et al., Nature Human Behaviour, doi: 10.1038/s41562-022-01506-4