At the onset of COVID-19 pandemics, Slovenia was forced to implement many measures to limit the spread of the virus in educational settings. One of those measures was distant education, a common response on a global scale as it only in 2020 affected the education of over 1.2 billion students in 186 countries (Li & Lalani, 2020). It wasn't clear in advance how this new and unprecedented situation will influence emotional, social well-being and cognitive performance of students. Schools and teachers have coped with the situation in different ways. Outcomes of education were under changed circumstances questioned more than usually as there was concern that limitations in implementation of curricula would result in poorer performance of students, especially those with lower SES background (APA, 2021).

Although national assessment was suspended in 2020 in Slovenia as one of COVID-19 countermeasures, it was soon evident that many valuable insights could be gained by assessing performance of students and in this way gauge an effect of changed circumstances that pandemics brought. Therefore in 2021, national assessment in Grades 6 and 9 was conducted as usually on whole cohorts with minimal changes to facilitate better comparisons with previous years. Additionally, a questionnaire was created to gather students’ data on socio-economic background, and various social and emotional constructs reflecting their well-being and coping strategies during the school year of 2020/2021. Questions on student’s background included important factors like education and occupational status of father and mother (Alcaraz, 2018; Hortaçsu, 1995), inclusion in early childhood education, family structure, home possessions and home resources.

This research focuses on findings involving student background data and achievement of students and focuses on two main research issues. First is a question to what extent can we make reliable and valid SES measure from student questionnaire results – especially in the case of a younger sample of Grade 6 (12 years of age) students the usability should be empirically ascertained. If findings suggest that SES measure is valid and reliable in both samples the second aim is to focus on its relationship with students’ achievement on national assessment and what we can conclude about effects of the changed educational experience for Grade 6 and 9 students involved in our study. The positive association between SES and learning outcomes is common (Cankar, Bren & Zupanc, 2017; Hattie, 2009) but it is hard to predict the effects of COVID-19 pandemics on interplay between SES and outcomes. Several authors suggest that during COVID19 pandemics students from the lowest SES background suffer the greatest learning loss (Fuchs-Schündeln et al., 2020; Engzell et al., 2021). This could be rephrased in the context of fairness (Grek & Landri, 2021) as it implies differential toll on low SES groups (Doyle, 2020).

Achievement data used in this study came from yearly national assessment in Grades 6 and 9 for Slovene language and Mathematics. We gathered student background data through an online questionnaire. All students in both cohorts were invited to take the questionnaire but there was a considerable dropout. In Grade 6 12,601 students took the questionnaire and that represents 56% of whole cohort. In Grade 9 9,944 students took the questionnaire which accounts for 44% of whole cohort. The dropout affected the representativeness of the sample that was obvious in different distributions of national assessment results and gender compositions between the population and the sample of students who took the questionnaire. To account for that sample weights were prepared that were included in subsequent analyses. We created a composite measure of social-economic status out of background variables and tested several ways to do so. We used either Principal Components Analysis or Polytomous Rasch model (Andrich, 1988) in combination with different coding and imputation options to create best performing measure. Prior to analysis, all data was anonymised to confirm to Data Privacy Act. We analysed the data using statistical environment R (R Core Team, 2020).

We will demonstrate the most efficient way to construct a SES measure from the data at hand under given restraints. As one of samples represents 12-year-old students and there were constraints on number of items we were able to dedicate to background data in the questionnaire, there will remain some questions about the validity of the measure based on student questionnaire and we will discuss that. We will provide insights into the effects of distant learning and the changed educational experience of students. We will also present different approaches we used to assess comparability with previous national assessment results and summarize the findings to create an insight about those aspects of students’ performance that can be assessed through national assessment results. Limitations and generalizability of findings will be presented and discussed.

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