Abstract
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students worldwide have experienced fundamental changes to their learning. Schools had to shift to distance education as part of the effort to stop the spread of the virus. Although distance learning undoubtedly resulted in challenges for all students, there is much concern that it exacerbated existing educational inequalities and led to disadvantages – particularly for students who were already struggling academically and lacking support from family and school. The aim of this paper was to investigate the possible impact of family and child characteristics, school performance prior to lockdown, and support at home and from school during lockdown in coping with self-regulated distance learning during times of COVID-19. The paper draws on data from a two-wave longitudinal study surveying 155 lower secondary school students aged 13–14years from a rural-alpine region in Austria. Data were collected 1year before the start of the pandemic and directly after schools had returned to in-class teaching after the first lockdown. Our findings support the notion that distance learning poses a substantial risk for exacerbating existing educational disadvantages. They show that coping with out-of-school learning was especially challenging for students with low academic achievement and learning motivation prior to the pandemic. Furthermore, findings demonstrate that the support from parents and teachers foster students’ capabilities to cope with the self-regulatory demands connected with distance learning. Although the importance of competencies for self-regulated learning became particularly evident in the context of the pandemic, from our findings, it can be concluded that in the future, schools should strengthen their investment in promoting competencies for self-regulated learning. Self-regulation must be recognized as an essential educational skill for academic achievement and life-long learning.
Highlights
After the World Health Organization (2020) had declared the Coronavirus disease outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020, many countries around the world instigated temporary closures of schools and universities as part of an effort to prevent and slow down transmission of the virus
Based upon the above findings and theoretical considerations concerning self-regulation and the development of educational inequalities, we propose that academic achievement and learning motivation prior to school shutdown may predict ability to cope with self-regulated learning during distance learning
Shortly before the data collection was to take place, schools, teachers, and students were faced with the requirement to shift to distance learning mode for several weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic
Summary
After the World Health Organization (2020) had declared the Coronavirus disease outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020, many countries around the world instigated temporary closures of schools and universities as part of an effort to prevent and slow down transmission of the virus. We seek to examine how students managed to cope with the new challenges of self-regulated distance learning during school closures. Involuntary distance learning created challenges for all students, based upon previous studies and theoretical considerations of the development of educational inequalities (Maaz et al, 2010; APA, 2020; Grewenig et al, 2020; Huber and Helm, 2020; SRCD, 2020), we argue that school closures did not affect all students to the same extent. We assume increased disadvantages for those students with low levels of academic achievement and learning motivation and with low competence in self-regulation prior to lockdown and for those students with little support at home or from school during the shutdown
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