Reacción a "Reactions: pandemic caused educational delays equivalent to a third of the academic year"

The study is methodologically very well designed. In meta-analyses of this kind (i.e., studies in which the results of many individual studies are considered together), it is important that the quality of the individual studies included in the evaluation is checked very carefully. This has obviously been done very meticulously here. The paper is probably the most comprehensive study to date of post-corona pandemic learning deficits. When interpreting the findings, it must of course be taken into account that studies from different countries were included here, some of whose results cannot be transferred to the German education systems. For example, the learning gaps in poorer countries are once again significantly greater than in a rather rich country like Germany. But overall, we also see learning gaps in this country, and we especially see their uneven distribution: students who already had a harder time before the pandemic are much more affected.

The learning deficits observed in the meta-analysis are significant. Those we found in studies from Germany, for example in Hamburg and in Baden-Wurttemberg, are somewhat smaller, but tend to point in the same direction. Pandemic-related learning deficits certainly also play a role in the findings recently presented in the IQB Education Trends. Not only are the backlogs themselves unevenly distributed socially, but their consequences are also likely to vary widely: many students with the appropriate social background will easily make up for it. However, the consequences will be more severe, especially for lower achievers and for students from less educated homes. In addition, the study focuses on cognitive learning deficits, i.e. on the question of what students have learned - or not learned - in German and math, for example. If you ask teachers, it becomes clear that in addition to the actual learning deficits, there is another problem in the foreground, namely the whole psychosocial area. My impression is that schools currently have a lot of work to do in this area to reestablish certain learning routines and to get the whole social interaction back on track.

The federal government has already made extensive funds available for a so-called catch-up program. But it is also clear that these measures alone will not be enough in the end. Additional support measures are important, of course, but we will only be able to reduce social inequalities if the great heterogeneity (i.e., difference/diversity) of the students is also taken more into account in the normal classroom. In the end, it will only work through targeted support in regular classes as well. If additional resources are made available now, attention must be paid to how these resources are distributed. We can clearly see from the data that certain students have suffered particularly from the pandemic - precisely those who were already having a hard time. The task now must be to provide targeted support for precisely these students - including in regular classes. In a large state like Baden-Wurttemberg, about half of the students now have a so-called migration background. Given this number, we cannot, for example, pretend that it is the normal case that all children in our elementary schools speak perfect German. Such things must be systematically taken into account in the classroom. We can't afford as a democratic society - or, for that matter, as an economy - to have a portion of our students take so little away from school.

It is important to see that many of the problems that are now becoming visible in schools would have to be addressed even without a pandemic. It is good that the connection between the social background of the students has now become more present again as an issue in the education policy debate. Fortunately, there is also a great deal of agreement that these problems must now be addressed. It is also interesting to see that schools have come through the pandemic with varying degrees of success. For example, classes where the relationship between students and their teachers was positive even before the pandemic had a much easier time during the school closures. We saw the importance of good feedback to students that promotes learning at the latest when schools were closed from one day to the next and teachers had to consider the ways in which they could still reach their students at all.“
„There are schools that had already established a system before the pandemic that allows them to keep a close eye on learning progress - so that they can provide direct and targeted support in the event of learning problems. During the school closures, it then became clear how important this is. During the pandemic, there has been huge progress in many schools - not only in digitization, but also in how we can use digital tools pedagogically so that they support learning. I hope these things don't disappear back into closets and drawers now. In perspective, these are also the approaches that will help us deal with the consequences of the pandemic in schools.