Session Information
11 ONLINE 48 A, Quality of school education
Paper Session
MeetingID: 922 4713 8149 Code: qP9G6Z
Contribution
The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected all spheres of social live. Measures to contain the pandemic also affected education. Around the world, schools were closed in spring 2020 and in-person teaching was switched to distance education. Since the sudden occurrence of the pandemic caught most schools unprepared, it is reasonable to assume that the switch to distance learning was accompanied by losses in school quality as well as instructional quality. A common assumption is that school closures lead to even more disadvantages for socioeconomically deprived students as they are usually less supported by their parents and worse equipped (e.g., housing, technical devices) than students from high-income families. A review of surveys focusing on the first lockdown (Author, 2021) showed that between 80% and 90% of the teachers surveyed expected a COVID-19-induced increase in the social gap regarding the learning success of their classes/students. To counteract challenges triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence for educational policy, administration, and practitioners is needed. In recent months, research concerning effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on teaching and learning was ramped up. Besides descriptive studies using self-reported data (see Author, 2021 for an overview) there is an increasing body of research that uses inferential statistics to carve out the relationship between students’ socioeconomic background and distance learning. Moreover, national as well as international studies using student achievement data analyze the effects of school closures during the crisis on social disparities in education. First meta-analysis (Hammerstein et al., 2021; Zierer, 2021) confirmed the common assumption that pandemic-related school closures increase educational inequality. Nevertheless, little is known about how the mechanisms underlying the COVID-19-related increase in educational inequality. While there are several studies that explore the mechanism at the level of students’ learning at home, we are not aware of any studies that investigate if and to what extant the development of dimensions of school and instructional quality is affected by the school closures. In addition, to date no empirical knowledge exists on whether socially disadvantaged schools did suffer more from school closures than privileged schools.
While the literature on COVID-19 and schooling is full of theoretical arguments at the student level explaining an increase in educational inequality due to school closures (Grewenig et al., 2020; Grätz & Lipps, 2020; Dietrich et al., 2020; Huebener et al., 2021), losses in school quality have hardly been cited as a trigger of educational inequality. We thus focus on pandemic-related losses in school and instructional quality as possible triggers of educational inequality, assuming that these losses are more strongly pronounced at a) schools that did have lower quality already before the pandemic started and b) schools that are more socially disadvantaged, i.e., the have a higher index of social disadvantage. Regarding school and instructional quality, we follow models that emphasize teacher cooperation, teacher-student relationship, student learning support, and instructional quality in general as central aspects of well-performing schools. We assume that these dimensions are particularly relevant in times of crisis.
Research Questions
The aim of our study is twofold:
RQ 1. Firstly, we analyze whether schools, that were already rated as having low school quality before the pandemic suffered greater quality declines than other schools that were rated as having higher school quality before the pandemic ("Matthew effect").
RQ 2. Secondly, we examine the influence of social composition of the student body of a school on the development in school and instructional quality during the COVID-19 pandemic
Method
Sample & Data Collection Process. This study was a part of a study launched to monitor the school situation during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. To this end, repeated waves of surveys of school leaders, teachers, students, and parents were conducted at intervals of several months. The teacher survey of the third wave forms the data basis of the present study. In total, 832 teachers from Germany, 278 teachers from Austria, and 131 teachers from Switzerland took part in they survey. The survey was conducted during winter 2020 to spring 2021. Instruments. Dimensions of school quality and instructional quality were collected by established scales (Author et al., 2020) that ask for teachers’ perception of Instructional Quality in General, Teacher-Student Relationship, Consideration of Student Needs, Teacher Cooperation With Social Worker, Use of Digital Media in Teaching, Mutual Support Within the College, Professional Exchange on the School Development Process, Joint Creation of Teaching Materials, Time for Parental Work, and Quality of Teacher-Parent Relation. Teacher’s ware asked to rate the quality dimensions twice, once for the pre-pandemic time, and once for the time during school closure in spring 2020. In addition, teachers were asked to rate the socioeconomic composition of the student body at their school regarding the following aspects: Number of students that do not speak German at home who have been certified as having special educational needs with lack of engagement in class from financially disadvantaged families with lack of family support from parents with an academic education These indicators were combined to an index of socially disadvantaged schools. Finally, teachers estimated their school’s proportion of students who were lost due to COVID-19. Analytic Procedure. We analyze the data by means of a bivariate latent change score modelling approach to answer RQ 1. Regression analysis is applied in a second step to predict latent changes in the assessed dimensions of school quality and instructional quality by the social index of a school (RQ 2).
Expected Outcomes
RQ 1. The findings show that all recorded dimensions of school and instructional quality decreased significantly during the first lockdown (2 exceptions: significant increase in the use of digital media, significant increase in time spent on parenting). For all quality characteristics, the so-called Matthew effect cannot be observed. Teachers' assessment of school and teaching quality before COVID-19 is significantly and negatively correlated with the change in school and teaching quality during the first lockdown in spring 2020. This means that schools whose quality was assessed high before COVID-19 suffered particularly sharp declines in quality than schools whose quality was assessed as low before COVID-19. One possible explanation is that particularly positively implemented quality features (e.g., teacher cooperation) could no longer be implemented or could only be implemented to a limited extent during the school closure (and the associated home office for teachers). RQ 2. The findings regarding the influence of socioeconomic composition of the student body on the development of school quality confirm the assumption that more socially disadvantaged schools experienced higher quality losses during the pandemic than privileged schools, at least in part. For example, a school's social index, as assessed from a teacher's perspective, is significantly negatively related to declines in the two quality dimensions of "mutual support within the college" and "addressing diverse student needs." In addition, the school’s proportion of students who got lost due to COVID-19 negatively predicts losses in the quality dimensions "mutual support in the college", "consideration of different needs of students", "quality of pedagogical work", and "teacher-student relationship". Negative correlations mean that a higher social index of a school (positive value) is accompanied by a higher reduction in school quality (negative values).
References
Dietrich, H., Patzina, A., & Lerche, A. (2020). Social inequality in the homeschooling efforts of German high school students during a school closing period. European Societies, 1–22. Frohn, J. (2020). Bildungsbenachteiligung im Ausnahmezustand. 59-83 / PraxisForschungLehrer*innenBildung. Zeitschrift für Schul- und Professionsentwicklung., Vol. 2 No. 6 (2020), Bildungsgerechtigkeit und Lehrpraxis / PraxisForschungLehrer*innenBildung. Zeitschrift für Schul- und Professionsentwicklung., Vol. 2 No. 6 (2020): Schulische Bildung in Zeiten der Pandemie. Befunde, Konzepte und Erfahrungen mit Blick auf Schul- und Unterrichtsorganisation, Bildungsgerechtigkeit und Lehrpraxis. Grätz, M., & Lipps, O. (2021). Large loss in studying time during the closure of schools in Switzerland in 2020. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 71, 100554. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2020.100554 Grewenig, E., Lergetporer, P., Werner, K., Wößmann, L., & Zierow, L. (2020). COVID-19 and Educational Inequality: How School Closures Affect Low- and High-Achieving Students. München: IZA Institute for Labor Economics. Hammerstein, S., König, C., Dreisörner, T., & Frey, A. (2021). A systematic literature review on effects of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning outcomes. GEBF: Corona und Bildung. Huebener, M., Schmitz, L., Spiess, C. K., & Zinn, S. (2021). Familiale, individuelle und institutionelle Einflussfaktoren auf Bildungsungleichheit. In D. Dohmen & K. Hurrelmann (Hrsg.), Generation Corona? Wie Jugendliche durch die Pandemie benachteiligt werden (S. 165–186). Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Zierer, K. (2021). Effects of Pandemic-Related School Closures on Pupils’ Performance and Learning in Selected Countries: A Rapid Review. Education Sciences, 11(6), 252.
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