Learning at home during COVID-19 school closures – How do German students with and without special educational needs manage?

Abstract

School closures due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic put challenges on teachers, students and their parents. In particular, students with special educational needs or students with low achievement levels who need more support in learning may have more difficulties coping compared to their peers. Using longitudinal data of the German National Educational Panel Study, the circumstances of students in secondary school during the time of school closures are characterised, in particular focusing on students who have been diagnosed with special educational needs or showing low achievement levels at the end of primary school. Overall, parents of students with special educational needs or low achievement levels do not report more challenges with respect to the situation of learning at home. However, differentiated results are found with regard to satisfaction with the support provided by the school, the amount of weekly learning time, and parental support. The situation of students with less favourable conditions in terms of learning at home by themselves needs special attention when face-to-face-instructions cannot be carried out as usual to achieve successful learning.

Global emergency remote education in secondary schools during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Five studies explicitly included evidence about students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). For instance, Becker et al (2020) explored the experiences of students with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, and four other studies included students with a range of profiles from Indonesia (Balkist & Agustiani, 2020), Spain (Álvarez-Guerrero et al, 2021), Scotland (Education Scotland, 2021), and Germany (Nusser, 2021). Of the 52 studies with students as participants, only 40% (n = 21) reported which school year students were in (see Figure 5).…”

“…A consequence of higher levels of disengagement was that students had lower levels of overall motivation (reported in 16 studies, 20%) and lower motivation was identified as being particularly problematic among lower achieving students in some studies (Nusser, 2021;Maelan et al, 2021;Pelikan et al, 2021). Although the explanations put forward for lower motivation among students were diffuse, a number of studies attributed issues with technology and internet connection as explanatory factors (Al Salman et al, 2021;Dema et al, 2021;Hodgen et al, 2020).…”

“…They found that females performed significantly better than males in all three areas during in-person learning, but that the differences were eliminated as a result of the pandemic. One study of SEND students in Germany (Nusser, 2021) found that home schooling was more challenging for parents if their child was male.…”

“…They highlighted the importance of their parents for securing access to online resources, providing a suitable home-learning environment, reducing household chores and for supporting them emotionally (Kochan, 2021). Parents also provided guidance and supervision (Álvarez-Guerrero 2021; Ang & Wu, 2021;Kochan, 2021;Nusser, 2021), which students found helpful for enhancing their understanding of the subject matter (Kochan, 2021). Parental support with online learning was especially important when students were required to produce visual material, such as videos (Baptista et al, 2020).…”

Schule während der Corona-Pandemie. Neue Ergebnisse und Überblick über ein dynamisches Forschungsfeld

“…Abhängig vom Skalenniveau wurden dabei entweder lineare oder multinominale Regressionen berechnet. Die Regressionen wurden mit dem Programm Mplus durchgeführt (Muthén & Muthén, 2012). Fehlende Werte wurden dabei mit FIML (Full Information Maximum Likelihood Estimation) geschätzt.…”