The impact of COVID-19 on the learning during the lockdown

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 pandemic led Spanish population to a mandatory lockdown between March and May 2020. This meant closing schools and moving the rest of the 2019-2020 academic year to an online format. This work analyzes how the educational process developed during lockdown and estimates the impact that the interaction between online education and parents' teleworking situation had on students' critical thinking skills. To do this, we collected data at the beginning and at the end of the 2019-2020 academic year on critical thinking from students at the third year of secondary education from 15 educational institutions in the Region of Madrid. Firstly, we concluded that public schools faced more difficulties than private government-dependent schools for continuing with the teaching-learning process. In order to follow online classes, 70% of the students in private government-dependent schools had a desktop or laptop compared to 40% of the students in public schools. Moreover, meanwhile 73% of the students in private publicly funded schools devoted more than 4 hours to classes and online tasks, this figure slightly exceeded 50% for students in public schools. Secondly, in general, the different work situations of parents did not have significant effects on students' critical thinking. However, we did find that, for students with academic results below the average at the beginning of the school year, the fact that the mother teleworked during school closing had a positive and significant impact on their academic results. This suggests that teleworking allowed mothers to provide greater support and supervision to their children. © 2023, Univ Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED). All rights reserved.