Impacts of Primary School Closures on Educational Inequalities

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thorsten Schneider
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2021 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 470160684

To curb the spread of Covid-19, schools in Germany closed in mid-March 2020 for a period of several weeks and again at the end of the same year. Instead of in-person instruction, they introduced several forms of remote learning. In spring 2020, no one was fully prepared for this situation—neither schools and teachers nor parents and children. This led to a massive reduction in teaching time and likely also teaching quality, and placed much of the burden of learning support on parents, especially in the case of younger children. This project will focus on students in the first grades of primary school and will address two key questions: 1) how parental support for learning differed by socio-economic status (SES) during primary school closures as part of the first lockdown in Germany, and 2) what role parental support and family activities played in reducing or increasing achievement gaps by SES. We will use theories and research on cultural resources, home learning environments, parental learning support, and on how school holidays affect achievement gaps to explain and predict the effects of school closures in spring 2020.The project will analyze data from Starting Cohort 1 of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS SC1). The nationwide probability sample of children born between February and June 2012 tested the same children and interviewed their parents on repeated occasions: before school enrolment in spring 2018, at the end of first grade in 2019, and in summer 2020, after the first school closures, at the transition between second and third grade. In 2020, parents reported in detail on how they supported their child during school closures. We will use different regression techniques to investigate SES differences in the quantity and quality of parental learning support, and to study if and how this support changed SES gaps in student numeracy and early reading literacy.Answers to both questions will not only provide descriptive evidence on the lockdown in spring 2020; they will also advance our understanding of how important families are in producing achievement inequalities and to what degree (primary) schools counterbalance these inequalities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants