The Pandemic, Socioeconomic Disadvantage, and Learning Outcomes in Germany

Abstract

This chapter examines the consequences of school disruptions precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic for academic learning in German elementary and secondary schools. On average, German schools were fully or partially closed for 38 weeks since the onset of the pandemic. German students experienced moderate learning losses due to school closures. National and international trend studies showed that competence test scores were between 0.17 and 0.22 standard deviations below pre-pandemic scores, on average. Regarding at-risk student populations, learning losses were twice as large for students from households with lower socioeconomic status, according to the IQB Trend in Student Assessment. Due to the federal structure of education in Germany, the responses of the educational administration to the learning disruption were heterogeneous. Extensive monetary support from the national administration enabled the recruitment of additional teaching staff to support at-risk learners. With regard to the World Bank’s RAPID framework, the policies were only partly successful because of ambiguous criteria for allocating the funds and a lack of enough qualified teaching personnel. Some actions were also delayed by intricate administrative procedures. Overall, the compensatory policies reached most children and facilitated additional remedial teaching, mostly in the fundamental domains of language and mathematics. Recent large-scale assessments from late 2022 and early 2023 indicate some learning loss recovery and a slight reduction of the socioeconomic achievement gap. Moving forward, the lessons learned during the pandemic should be translated to address new and ongoing challenges such as the increasing number of non-German-speaking refugee students.

IQB-Bildungstrend 2022. Sprachliche Kompetenzen am Ende der 9. Jahrgangsstufe im dritten Ländervergleich

“…B. Betthäuser et al, 2023;Schult & Schneider, 2023). Dies muss bei der Interpretation der Ergebnisse des IQB-Bildungstrends 2022 berücksichtigt werden (vgl.…”