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Sebastian Gollnow / dpa
Suddenly the satchel sat in the corner for weeks and months.
Two years ago, on March 16, Germany's schools were closed, and Corona dictated the timetable from then on.
Since then, children and young people have had to adapt to a lively alternation of distance, alternating and face-to-face teaching, to everyday life in a state of emergency.
According to an OECD study, the schools remained completely or partially closed on more than 180 days – that corresponds to almost a whole school year.
How has all of this affected performance?
For a long time people poked around in the fog with this question.
During the crisis, the Ministers of Education had temporarily suspended the obligation to carry out nationwide comparative tests such as VERA.
Some carried out the tests anyway, many others did not.
For the first time, a study by the Institute for School Development Research (IFS) at the TU Dortmund has shown that the learning losses, at least among primary school children, in the area of reading are "alarming" compared to the pre-corona period.
Accordingly, the group of good and very good readers in fourth grade has shrunk;
The group of those who have problems reading and understanding texts, on the other hand, has grown – after just one year of the pandemic.
Using representative data from a total of more than 4,000 children at 111 selected primary schools in Germany, the research team used the IGLU test (International Primary School Reading Study) to examine how the reading skills of fourth-graders in 2021 differed from 2016.
At the time of the survey, the children had been through the corona crisis for around a year.
Most of the school closures occurred during this period.
“If you express it in terms of years of learning, the children are missing an average of half a year of learning,” says researcher Ulrich Ludewig.
Certain trends, such as girls reading better than boys on average, persisted, but ultimately the learning deficits affect primary school children across all groups and all social milieus.
"Since reading is a central skill, this result also has an impact on all other school subjects," emphasizes study leader Nele McElvany.
The results in detail:
On average, girls continue to perform better than boys when it comes to reading, but the level of reading has fallen in both sexes.
On average, children from families with more than a hundred books at home – which is often associated with a higher affinity for education – can read better than children from families with fewer books.
But the mean reading proficiency of both groups is similarly lower than in 2016.
Children with poor learning conditions at home - no desk of their own and no Internet access - have greater learning difficulties than children with good basic conditions.
The reading skills of primary school children of non-German origin tended to suffer more from the pandemic than that of children of German origin.
The difference in the reading skills of children with foreign roots and those who were born in Germany has increased.
The research team gives it as around one and a half years of learning.
In their study, the researchers write that the current generation of schoolchildren in Germany generally show significantly lower reading skills than five years ago.
»That is alarming.« In order to close this gap again, it is now important to have comprehensive and effective support and funding offers.
"The children examined here are currently in the fifth grade - so in addition to primary schools, secondary schools must also be systematically considered in order to promote reading," emphasizes McElvany.
Last year, the federal government launched a Corona catch-up program for children and young people worth two billion euros to compensate for learning deficits caused by the pandemic.
A billion of this is to flow primarily into tutoring and support hours in schools in order to close any learning gaps in the core subjects German, mathematics and English.
Some countries have also invested in appropriate funding.
However, teachers' associations have so far been skeptical about the effects.
A general assessment is difficult because of the different measures in the federal states, said the chairwoman of the Education and Science Union (GEW), Maike Finnern, at the beginning of the year.
»However, the majority of the GEW state associations report back that the measures are obviously not having the desired effect.« Finnern criticized the fact that many offers do not reach the children who need the most support, but rather those »whose parents (can) take care of it. «.
Better in English thanks to YouTube?
Only a few federal states have so far systematically recorded the extent of the learning deficits, as a SPIEGEL survey of the education ministries shows.
In
Hamburg
, as part of the usual “Kermit 3” tests, more than 85 percent of the children in the third grade were tested in state-wide tests after the summer holidays.
In German and mathematics, the proportion of children who have greater difficulty keeping up has increased significantly, and more so in socially disadvantaged milieus than in others.
Only in spelling did third graders of the 2021/22 school year do better than previous years.
The team explains this with the effects of Hamburg's »spelling offensive«.
Among other things, children have to practice a basic vocabulary with 785 “model words”.
At the beginning of the school year in
Baden-Württemberg
, all fourth and eighth graders took part in comparative tests, the so-called VERA tests, in German, mathematics and a foreign language.
Fifth graders were also tested.
According to the results, the schoolchildren in particular who find it difficult to learn independently of Corona should now be supported, according to the authority.
Schleswig-Holstein
had VERA tests carried out in grades 3, 6 and 8 as well as voluntarily standardized online tests in grades 3 to 10. "The learning deficits are not nearly as great as one might have assumed," it says.
Gaps tended to be larger in elementary school students.
There has been progress in English among high school students, “possibly also because many of them are increasingly using digital channels, including English-language channels, such as YouTube or podcasts” in their free time.
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania
surveyed the teachers.
In almost three-quarters of the schools, the majority found “that the gap between high-performing and under-performing students has increased due to the corona-related restrictions”.
Nevertheless, the initial situation is predominantly rated as a “satisfactory basis for further work in the current school year”.
However, 12 percent of teachers see this critically.
You are less optimistic.
The educational researcher Kai Maaz already warned in the SPIEGEL interview that smaller studies indicated that weaknesses in reading and mathematics had become even greater in the course of the pandemic than they already were.
"It's a big mistake," says Maaz, "that we don't see this peculiarity of the situation as such and try to continue working on it."