Abstract
From spring 2020 many countries throughout Europe and beyond temporarily closed schools to tackle the spread of the coronavirus. First studies indicate that these school closures resulted in lower learning gains compared to learning gains in preceding years and widened social and ethnic disparities by affecting disadvantaged students more strongly than their more advantaged peers. Moreover, during school closures, parental involvement in distance learning is regarded as crucial for successful learning, especially for younger children. In the current study, we examine whether social and ethnic disparities in the reading achievement of primary school students widened during COVID-related school closures in spring 2020 and whether increased disparities are mediated by parental involvement in distance learning. We use data from 409 Austrian 2nd graders, whose teachers participated in an ongoing study on the use of learning progress assessment. Adopting a within-subject design, we first compare the effects of social and ethnic family background on reading achievement during a pre-lockdown period with the respective effects during a lockdown period of similar length. Controlling for pre-lockdown reading differences, we found that low socioeconomic status and non-German language use at home negatively predicted post-lockdown reading achievement, indicating that post-lockdown disparities were larger than expected due to disparities at pre-lockdown. In contrast, we found no such effects during the pre-lockdown period. Second, a series of mediation models did not provide any support for the hypothesis that parental involvement accounted for family background effects on reading achievement during the lockdown period.
Highlights
From spring 2020, many countries throughout Europe and beyond temporarily closed schools to tackle the spread of the coronavirus
The correlations of reading with socioeconomic status (SES), language use (LU) at home, and migration background (MB) are all small to moderate in size and significant
Note that in the case of two reported values separated by a slash, the first value refers to the results using language use as indicator of the ethnic background (Section A in Supplementary Table A4) and the second value refers to results for migration background (Section B in Supplementary Table A4)
Summary
From spring 2020, many countries throughout Europe and beyond temporarily closed schools to tackle the spread of the coronavirus. Drawing on longitudinal achievement data from pre-COVID school years and School Closures and Educational Inequalities research on the effects of being out of school (e.g., summer loss research or absenteeism research), Kuhfeld et al (2020) projected that after school closures in spring 2020 students would start the school year 2020–2021 with substantially lower achievement levels in reading and mathematics relative to a typical school year. Drawing on SelfDetermination Theory (SDT, Grolnick et al, 1997), several studies show that a more frequent involvement (i.e., quantity of involvement) might even have negative effects on child achievement (Moroni et al, 2015; Barger et al, 2019), whereas homework involvement that supports autonomy, provides structure and is not controlling (i.e., does not interfere with children’s need for autonomy) positively predicts achievement (Dumont et al, 2014; Grolnick et al, 2015; Moroni et al, 2015)
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