Inequalities in Teaching and Learning During the Pandemic

• In Event: The Impact of COVID-19 on Education: International Evidence From the Responses to Educational Disruption Survey

Abstract

"Inclusive and equitable education is a central component of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and academic discourse on education (e.g., United Nations, 2015). In this paper, we focus on inequalities in educational opportunity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the extensive literature on group differences in educational opportunity (e.g., Coleman et al., 1966;), we considered three categories of inequality: gender gaps, socioeconomic gaps, and the rural-urban divide. These and other dimensions of inequality have been part of the reporting in international comparative studies for many years. We focus on how the pandemic has affected family life, well-being, students’ anxiety about their educational career, and their readiness for self-directed learning.

Data from the Responses to Educational Disruption Survey (REDS) was used to study inequality in educational opportunity. Specifically, we used data from the student survey that was administrated in the eight countries Burkina Faso, Denmark, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Russian Federation, Slovenia, the United Arabic Emirates, and Uzbekistan. We used eight student-reported measures of educational opportunity, namely, information on whether (i) their parents lost their job and (ii) worked from home, (iii) loneliness, (iv) physical activity, (v) worriedness about education and (vi) falling behind, (vii) confidence in planning schoolwork independently as well as (viii) perceived preparedness for future school closures. Each measure was surveyed by an individual items that had either a Likert- or a frequency scale as response options.

The gender gap was simply defined as the difference between males and females. The socioeconomic status (SES) was determined by using an index that combined student-reported information on parental education, parental occupation, and the number of books in the household. In the case of varying education or occupations of the parents, we used the highest-ranked parent. We computed the sum of the three indicators to divide students in each country’ sample into low and high SES groups based on this sum score. Since REDS compared a wide range of economically developed and developing countries, we used relative (country-specific) thresholds to form two roughly equally sized groups of low and high SES students for each country. School locations reported by principals were used to calculate the difference between students in rural and urban areas. Villages or towns with less than 15,000 inhabitants were defined as rural and towns with equal or more than 15,000 inhabitants as urban.

The key finding of our analysis is that there are inequalities in educational opportunity both between and within countries. Overall, the differences between countries are larger than the gender, SES, and urban-rural gaps. However, for some items, we observed inequalities within multiple or even all countries favoring one particular group of students. In all countries, socioeconomically disadvantaged students were more likely to express fear of falling behind than socioeconomically privileged children. Working from home was more common for socioeconomically advantaged parents and took place more often in urban areas for most countries. Female students were particularly concerned that COVID-19 would affect their future education in Russia, Slovenia, and Denmark.
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Authors

• Rolf Strietholt, IEA Hamburg

• Felix Suttman, International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement