Sharp increase in inequality in education in times of the COVID-19-pandemic

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Abstract

The COVID-19-pandemic forced many countries to close schools abruptly in the spring of 2020. These school closures and the subsequent period of distance learning has led to concerns about increasing inequality in education, as children from lower-educated and poorer families have less access to (additional) resources at home. This study analyzes differences in declines in learning gains in primary education in the Netherlands for reading, spelling and math, using rich data on standardized test scores and register data on student and parental background for almost 300,000 unique students. The results show large inequalities in the learning loss based on parental education and parental income, on top of already existing inequalities. The results call for a national focus on interventions specifically targeting vulnerable students.

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Most cited references 22

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The Technology of Skill Formation

Flávio Antonio Degásperi da Cunha, James D Heckman (2007)

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Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic

Per Engzell, Arun Frey, Mark D. Verhagen (2021)

School closures have been a common tool in the battle against COVID-19. Yet, their costs and benefits remain insufficiently known. We use a natural experiment that occurred as national examinations in The Netherlands took place before and after lockdown to evaluate the impact of school closures on students’ learning. The Netherlands is interesting as a “best-case” scenario, with a short lockdown, equitable school funding, and world-leading rates of broadband access. Despite favorable conditions, we find that students made little or no progress while learning from home. Learning loss was most pronounced among students from disadvantaged homes. Suspension of face-to-face instruction in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to concerns about consequences for students’ learning. So far, data to study this question have been limited. Here we evaluate the effect of school closures on primary school performance using exceptionally rich data from The Netherlands ( n ≈ 350,000). We use the fact that national examinations took place before and after lockdown and compare progress during this period to the same period in the 3 previous years. The Netherlands underwent only a relatively short lockdown (8 wk) and features an equitable system of school funding and the world’s highest rate of broadband access. Still, our results reveal a learning loss of about 3 percentile points or 0.08 standard deviations. The effect is equivalent to one-fifth of a school year, the same period that schools remained closed. Losses are up to 60% larger among students from less-educated homes, confirming worries about the uneven toll of the pandemic on children and families. Investigating mechanisms, we find that most of the effect reflects the cumulative impact of knowledge learned rather than transitory influences on the day of testing. Results remain robust when balancing on the estimated propensity of treatment and using maximum-entropy weights or with fixed-effects specifications that compare students within the same school and family. The findings imply that students made little or no progress while learning from home and suggest losses even larger in countries with weaker infrastructure or longer school closures.

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Influence of COVID-19 confinement on students’ performance in higher education

T. González, M A De la Rubia, K. Hincz … (2020)

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.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Carla Haelermans:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9202-8427

Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: Funding acquisitionRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: ValidationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing

Roxanne Korthals: Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: Funding acquisitionRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: ValidationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing

Madelon Jacobs:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6245-8485

Role: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draft

Suzanne de Leeuw: Role: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draft

Stan Vermeulen: Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draft

Lynn van Vugt:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2671-9836

Role: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – original draft

Bas Aarts: Role: Writing – review & editing

Tijana Prokic-Breuer: Role: ConceptualizationRole: Funding acquisitionRole: Project administrationRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing

Rolf van der Velden: Role: ConceptualizationRole: Funding acquisitionRole: Project administrationRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing

Sanne van Wetten: Role: ConceptualizationRole: Writing – review & editing

Inge de Wolf: Role: ConceptualizationRole: Funding acquisitionRole: Project administrationRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing

Jérôme Prado: Role: Editor

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): PLoS One

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): PLoS One

Journal ID (publisher-id): plos

Title: PLoS ONE

Publisher: Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )

ISSN (Electronic): 1932-6203

Publication date (Electronic): 2 February 2022

Publication date Collection: 2022

Publication date PMC-release: 2 February 2022

Volume: 17

Issue: 2

Electronic Location Identifier: e0261114

Affiliations

[1 ] Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA), School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

[2 ] Initiative for Education Research (NRO), Den Haag, The Netherlands

[3 ] Inspectorate of Education, Utrecht, The Netherlands

[4 ] Education Lab, School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) & University of Lyon, FRANCE

Author notes

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

* E-mail: carla.haelermans@ 123456maastrichtuniversity.nl

Author information

Carla Haelermans https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9202-8427

Madelon Jacobs https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6245-8485

Lynn van Vugt https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2671-9836

Article

Publisher ID: PONE-D-21-21410

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0261114

PMC ID: 8809564

PubMed ID: 35108273

SO-VID: 3c732500-eb0c-4662-8869-759431854170

License:

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

History

Date received : 19 July 2021

Date accepted : 25 November 2021