COVID-stressed schools struggled to teach mathematics

Area of Science:

• Educational research
• Psychology
• Sociology

Background:

• The COVID-19 pandemic caused unpredictable school closures in Germany.
• Pandemic-related stressors affected curriculum delivery and school-based research.
• The INSIDE project, a German study on inclusive secondary education, faced significant sample attrition due to school dropouts during the pandemic.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effects of inclusive schooling in secondary education within the INSIDE project.
• To compare the impact of missing data imputation versus listwise deletion on school grades.
• To analyze how pandemic-related school attrition affects research findings.

Main Methods:

• Longitudinal data design with data collection ongoing since 2018.
• Comparison of two datasets: one with observed data (N=383) and one with imputed missing values (N=2999).
• Analysis of school grades (German and Mathematics) and demographic factors (parents' educational attainment, gender).

Main Results:

• No significant differences in parents' educational attainment or gender proportion between observed and imputed datasets.
• Larger integrative schools exhibited lower dropout rates than smaller single-type schools.
• Pupils from 'surviving' schools maintained equivalent German and Mathematics grades; however, imputed data from 'stressed' drop-out schools indicated a decline in Mathematics but not German grades.

Conclusions:

• Missing data in the longitudinal study were hypothesized as not missing at random (NMAR).
• Imputation of missing data in the INSIDE project revealed subject-specific grade deterioration (Mathematics) in schools heavily impacted by the pandemic.
• The findings suggest that pandemic-related school disruptions had a differential impact on academic performance, particularly affecting mathematics grades in vulnerable school settings.