Investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

Exploring school readiness skills and their impact on second grade academic competencies in 2021 - 2022
URL
URI
Conference
53rd DGPs Congress / 15th ÖGP Conference ; Vienna, Austria ; September 16–19, 2024
Publisher
Universität Wien
Book title
53rd DGPs Congress / 15th ÖGP Conference, September 16-19, 2024, Vienna, Austria : abstracts
First page
176
Last page
176
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Abstract
Studies show that early academic precursor skills are linked to later school achievement. Due to COVID-19 pandemic related preschool and kindergarten closures in 2020 and 2021, school readiness skills might have been affected negatively in first graders in Germany. Here, we examine whether school readiness skills in first graders differ between the years 2021 and 2022 and whether possible differences persist into second grade. German and math skills were assessed by the KEKS1 test (May & Bennöhr, 2013) at the start of school in N = 1831 first graders in 2021 and N = 1567 first graders in 2022 in Hamburg. Sociodemographic factors like sex, socioeconomic status, and non-German mother tongue did not differ between the cohorts. In Hamburg, the competence levels of primary school students in mathematics and German are regularly and comprehensively assessed in grades 2 and 3. While the results of the KEKS1 test are already available for the 2021 and 2022 cohorts, the link to the competence tests in grade 2 is still pending for both cohorts, but will be available and reported at the time of the conference.
Results show that the cohorts differed at the beginning of school with regard to competence levels in German (U = 1182953.50, Z = -7.33, p <.001) with a higher proportion of weak and very weak competence levels and a lower proportion of strong and very strong competence levels in 2021 compared to 2022, while competence levels in mathematics did not differ.
Version
Published version
Access right on openHSU
Metadata only access