In the aftermath of the global pandemic, it is important to investigate its effects. Previous research suggests that the pandemic has negatively affected students’ school performance and that students with low-educated parents are more disadvantaged than their highly educated counterparts. In this field of research, previous Swedish studies on the pandemic effect are rare. To evaluate the effect of different strategies during the pandemic a comparative design is applied in the present study, where two countries with different strategies are compared. This thesis aims to investigate the effects of the pandemic strategies on educational performance, more specifically math scores, in Germany and Sweden, and whether the effect differed between levels of cultural capital. To reach the aim, a difference-in-differences approach is conducted, using interaction terms between year and country. The data are from the OECD’s PISA tests from 2018 and 2022, where 15-year-olds’ knowledge is assessed. The results show that both countries’ test scores were negatively affected during the pandemic, but no general difference between the countries was found. When analyzing the score changes over time within groups of parental educational level the change was larger for the students with medium relative to highly educated parents in both Sweden and Germany. There was no change for the loweducated group in Sweden, and it was small in Germany. There was no significant difference in test scores between the years and countries depending on the level of parental education. In conclusion, the pandemic effect on educational performance did not statistically differ between the countries. The scores of the children with medium-educated parents had the largest drop, and the children with low-educated parents had the smallest drop in score, if any.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-231669 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Venemyr, Josefin |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Sociologiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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