Abstract
This study analyzes the effects of COVID-19 confinement on the autonomous learning performance of students in higher education. Using a field experiment with 458 students from three different subjects at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain), we study the differences in assessments by dividing students into two groups. The first group (control) corresponds to academic years 2017/2018 and 2018/2019. The second group (experimental) corresponds to students from 2019/2020, which is the group of students that had their face-to-face activities interrupted because of the confinement. The results show that there is a significant positive effect of the COVID-19 confinement on students' performance. This effect is also significant in activities that did not change their format when performed after the confinement. We find that this effect is significant both in subjects that increased the number of assessment activities and subjects that did not change the student workload. Additionally, an analysis of students' learning strategies before confinement shows that students did not study on a continuous basis. Based on these results, we conclude that COVID-19 confinement changed students' learning strategies to a more continuous habit, improving their efficiency. For these reasons, better scores in students' assessment are expected due to COVID-19 confinement that can be explained by an improvement in their learning performance.
Highlights
The coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak disrupted life around the globe in 2020
We present a study that involves more than 450 students enrolled in 3 subjects from different degrees from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain) during three academic years, including data obtained in the 2019/2020 academic year, when the restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic have been in force
The second online platform used in this study is the Moodle platform provided by the Biochemistry Department from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, where all the tests that do not use adaptive questions are implemented
Summary
The coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak disrupted life around the globe in 2020. As in any other sector, the COVID-19 pandemic affected education in many ways. New e-learning platforms are being developed for tutors to facilitate assessments and for learners to participate in lectures [4, 5]. Both assessment processes and self-evaluation have been proven to benefit from technological advancement. The inclusion of e-Learning tools in higher education implies that a greater amount of information can be analyzed, improving teaching quality [8,9,10]. Many studies have been performed analyzing the advantages and challenges of massive data analysis in higher education [11]. Jovanovic et al demonstrated that assisting students in their management of learning resources is critical for a correct management of their learning strategies in terms of regularity [13]
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