No abstract

Norwegian teachers and school leaders had to organise and provide homeschooling for their students from March to May 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A survey conducted in May 2020 examined lower secondary school students' experiences of distance learning. How students at different levels of academic achievement (based on grades) experienced homeschooling was compared to comparable findings from a survey conducted on students from the same schools during the autumn of 2018. The findings indicate that students experienced less support and feedback from their teachers during homeschooling, and that teachers gave more written than oral feedback to the students during homeschooling than they do in regular school. Furthermore, there was a tendency of lower efforts and self-efficacy among low-achieving students, which might be difficult to reverse when schools reopen. The findings raise growing concerns about homeschooling leading to a larger gap between high-and low-achieving students in lower secondary school.

The main aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which prior social skills and academic achievement as well as the teachers' gender and the gender ratio of classes explained boys' and girls' teacher-assessed academic achievement in Norwegian, mathematics and English. Data were collected from 153 classes at 27 Norwegian schools in the autumn of 2012 and 2014, including 2,266 first to tenth grade students, and were controlled for age, cultural background, prior social skills and prior academic achievement at the individual level and for class size. Overall, the results showed that previous academic achievement at the classroom level explained variance in boys' and girls' individual academic achievements in English and mathematics. In Norwegian, only the previous academic achievement at a class level was explanatory for girls subsequent individual achievement. The effects of previous academic achievement seemed to be larger for girls than for boys. Gender of teacher seemed to explain some of the variance for girls' academic achievement in Norwegian and English, but not for boys. In addition, at the classroom level, social skills and the gender ratio did not significantly influence boys' and girls' academic achievement.