Team

COVID-19 school closures hit low-achieving students particularly hard

A key feature of school closures is that there is no trained educator in the room to help. In their column Elisabeth Grewenig, Philipp Lergetporer, Katharina Werner, Ludger Woessmann, and Larissa Zierow argue that low-achieving students are particularly affected by the lack of teacher support. Based on a German time-use survey, it finds that students on average reduced daily learning time by about half during the school closures. This reduction was significantly larger for low-achieving students, who disproportionately replaced learning time with activities deemed detrimental to child development such as computer gaming rather than with more conducive activities such as reading.