As effective as summer vacation: researchers give distance learning poor marks

How does school start after the summer vacation?

The President of the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK), Brandenburg's Education Minister Britta Ernst (SPD), has spoken out against early stipulations on further restrictions on regular teaching.

"The KMK has advocated classroom teaching, and that should not be questioned prematurely," she told the newspaper Tagesspiegel in its Monday edition.

Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) said on Saturday that Corona measures in schools would have to be maintained for a long time. In autumn and winter, despite the currently very low incidence, measures such as mask compulsory or alternating instruction will probably still be necessary.

A study has meanwhile given the distance learning a bad rating during the Corona crisis. Researchers at the Frankfurt Goethe University looked at data from all over the world - the result is sobering: "The average development of skills during school closings in spring 2020 can be described as stagnation with a tendency to decline in skills and is therefore within the range of the effects of summer holidays", explained Prof. Andreas Frey, who teaches educational psychology at the Goethe University, one of the authors of the study.

For the study, researchers used a systematic review with scientific databases worldwide to identify those studies that reported on the effects of corona-related school closings on the performance and skills of schoolchildren. "We have only considered publications of high quality in terms of research methodology, which allow clear conclusions to be drawn about the effect of corona-related school closings on the acquisition of competences by schoolchildren and which use appropriate tests to measure performance or competency," explained Frey.

The loss of skills among children and adolescents from socially disadvantaged parental homes is particularly severe. "The previous assumptions are backed up by empirical evidence: the gap between rich and poor widened even further during the first corona-related school closings," concluded Frey. However, there are also initial indications that the effects of the later school closings from winter do not necessarily have to be just as drastic: in the meantime online teaching has improved in many places.