Corona and school: Significant reading deficits among elementary school students

Schools were closed on more than 180 days during the corona pandemic.

Even during the lockdown, teachers and educational researchers suspected that primary school students were particularly hard hit in their learning development.

This can now be proven with a study.

Heike Schmoll

Political correspondent in Berlin, responsible for “Bildungswelten”.

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The Institute for School Development Research (IFS) at the TU Dortmund examined representative data from a school panel study with a total of more than 4000 children in the years 2016 and 2021 at 111 selected primary schools in Germany using the tests of the International Primary School Reading Study (IGLU), how the reading literacy of fourth-grade students in Germany in 2021 will differ from the reading literacy of their pre-pandemic peers.

All schools took part in the IGLU study in 2016 and five years later they again took a standardized reading test from the IGLU study for the IFS school panel study.

This made it possible for the first time to compare the average reading competence of children at the end of primary school at the same schools before the pandemic and after more than a year of schooling under pandemic conditions.

More weak readers

The finding is alarming.

Because the group of students who can read well and very well has become smaller, while the group of weak readers has grown.

This is a trend that has already become apparent in all performance comparisons over the past few years, but is now becoming even more pronounced due to the school closures caused by the pandemic, especially in primary school.

At the time of the survey, the children had each had a year of the corona crisis.

Expressed in years of learning, the students are missing an average of half a year of learning.

Since reading is a key skill, all other specialist skills are indirectly affected.

The deficits do not only affect weak students or children from educationally disadvantaged families, but all social classes.

However, children with poor domestic conditions (no room of their own, no retreat areas) and children from families with a migration background suffer even greater losses.

The difference in the reading ability of children with foreign roots and those who were born in Germany has become even greater: the Dortmund researchers put it at one and a half school years.

The research team writes in its report that comprehensive and effective support and funding offers are needed to close this gap.

The children examined are currently in the fifth grade.

This means that reading promotion must be established not only in primary schools but also in secondary schools.