Regional trends in learning outcomes pre- and post-COVID19: Did digitalization have an impact?
Author(s): Elina Kilpi-Jakonen , Minna Tuominen, Alessandro Ferrara, Francesca Borgonovi
Thursday 15 | 11:20-11:40
Room: TP53
Session: Social stratification in a digital world
Many countries experienced a sharp decline in learning outcomes over the COVID19 pandemic. Some of these declines have been attributed to lockdown measures and the move to homeschooling. While some countries were better prepared in terms of electronic means of communication between teachers and students, others were less so, and a heavy burden was placed on parents.
In this presentation, we focus on the regional (sub-national) variation in learning trends between 2018–2022. We consider both the general trend as well as the trend for different socio-economic groups, including ethnic minority and migrant children. We then examine whether levels of digitalization within regions before the pandemic are associated with the over-time trends both overall and within the different subgroups. While there is already quite a lot of research on COVID19 and school achievement at the country level, sub-national regions have rarely been considered and especially not using a single comparable data source. We expect differences in the impact of school closures across regions, both because of differential school closures in many countries as well as regional differences in digitalization.
The data comes from the PISA 2018 and 2022 learning assessments. These two cross-sectional learning assessments of 15-year-olds cover countries across the world with differential impacts of COVID19 but also different rates of digitalization. However, only a handful of countries include regional information that can be used to analyse change at the regional level. Information on digitalization can be calculated from the PISA 2018 survey and aggregated to the regional level. The survey covers a wide range of digital resources and behaviours at home and in schools. Again, not all countries responded to this part of the survey. In some cases, information from other sources can also be linked to the regions to measure, for example, the spread of high-speed internet before the pandemic.
The countries suitable for analysis (including both regional information and digitalization) are the following European countries: Czech Republic, Finland, UK, Iceland, Serbia, and Spain; and the following non-European countries: Australia, Brazil, Kazakhstan, and Morocco. It is possible that more countries can still be added. In total these ten countries have 120,621 participants in PISA 2018 and 119,858 participants in PISA 2022.
The results will help us to give a more nuanced perspective on how learning outcomes and inequalities therein developed pre- and post-COVID19. In particular, the research will uncover whether the inequalities developed differentially between regions within countries or if trends were rather at the national level. Moreover, the results will contribute to the discussion on the role that digitalization has played for learning outcomes and inequalities therein.