COVID-19 third-grade school closures in Southern Germany showed no significant short-term or long-term effect on reading fluency¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 2024 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Neither the short-term (one month after closures) nor the long-term (one year after closures) deviation from the expected reading fluency trend was statistically significant in the DiD analysis. → Kraus 2024

Evidence¶

Kraus 2024¶

Kraus, E. B., Wild, J., Schilcher, A., & Hilbert, S. (2024). Exploring the Short-Term and Long-Term Effects of the COVID-19 School Closures on Reading Fluency in Southern Germany: A Longitudinal Causal Effects Analysis. https://osf.io/bu2ad/

q3 · i? · causal · r2

Longitudinal DiD analysis with propensity score weighting on n = 9,083 Bavarian students (38,088 data points), comparing a COVID-affected third-grade cohort to a control cohort. The lagged closure effects were non-significant: "χ2 β4β2 (1) = 1.33, pβ4β2 = .250"; no effect size was printed.

"Finally, the regression analysis supported the descriptive finding that school closures had no causal effect on reading fluency. Comparing β4 and β3 to β2, yielded non-significant results (χ2 β3β2 (1) = 0.0045, pβ3β2 = .947; χ2 β4β2 (1) = 1.33, pβ4β2 = .250)."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• The COVID-affected cohort caught up to the control cohort in reading fluency one year after the pandemic — related
• Reading fluency developed linearly in the sample, with an average six-month increase of 4.30 raw score units homogeneous across the performance range — related
• The COVID cohort scored significantly lower than the control cohort across the whole study duration — related
• A discrete time trend model fit the reading fluency data significantly better than a linear time trend model — related
• Meta-analytic evidence attributes average COVID learning losses of roughly -0.09 to -0.18 SD, larger in mathematics than reading — a broader claim this one bears on
• COVID-19 learning deficits arose early in the pandemic and have neither closed nor substantially widened since then — a broader claim this one bears on