Assignment strategies modulate students' academic performance in an online learning environment during the first and second COVID-19 related school closures.

A growing number of studies seek to evaluate the impact of school closures during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While most studies reported severe learning losses in students, some studies found positive effects of school closures on academic performance. However, it is still unclear which factors contribute to the differential effects observed in these studies. In this article, we examine the impact of assignment strategies for problem sets on the academic performance of students (n ≈ 16,000 from grades 4-10 who calculated ≈ 170,000 problem sets) in an online learning environment for mathematics, during the first and second period of pandemic-related school closures in Germany. We observed that, if teachers repeatedly assigned single problem sets (i.e., a small chunk of on average eight mathematical problems) to their class, students' performance increased significantly during both periods of school closures compared to the same periods in the previous year (without school closures). In contrast, our analyses also indicated that, if teachers assigned bundles of problem sets (i.e., large chunks) or when students self-selected problem sets, students' performance did not increase significantly. Moreover, students' performance was generally higher when single problem sets were assigned, compared to the other two assignment types. Taken together, our results imply that teachers' way of assigning problem sets in online learning environments can have a positive effect on students' performance in mathematics.

Academic performance of K-12 students in an online-learning environment for mathematics increased during the shutdown of schools in wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The shutdown of schools in response to the rapid spread of COVID-19 poses risks to the education of young children, including a widening education gap. In the present article, we investigate how school closures in 2020 influenced the performance of German students in a curriculum-based online learning software for mathematics. We analyzed data from more than 2,500 K-12 students who computed over 124,000 mathematical problem sets before and during the shutdown, and found that students' performance increased during the shutdown of schools in 2020 relative to the year before. Our analyses also revealed that low-achieving students showed greater improvements in performance than high-achieving students, suggesting a narrowing gap in performance between low- and high-achieving students. We conclude that online learning environments may be effective in preventing educational losses associated with current and future shutdowns of schools.