<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>In order to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, many schools have been closed for several months as of March 2020 in Germany. The unplanned and rapid shift to distance learning formats has led to fears that extensive learning deficits will be created and educational inequality will be further exacerbated. This paper, therefore, investigates the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on spelling skills (capitalisation, sounds and letters, separate and compound spelling and punctuation) of students in German-speaking countries. For this purpose, we use granular learning process data from an online learning platform for spelling competences with over 1 million solved exercise sets. We compare successful completion of exercise sets before the pandemic and after the first wave of the pandemic and estimate personal competence by a Rasch model. The result shows a loss of competence in 2020 and an increase in inequality in some grade levels and spelling domains. A linear model cannot confirm an overarching loss of competence.</p>
</abstract>

In order to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, many schools have been closed for several months as of March 2020 in Germany. The unplanned and rapid shift to distance learning formats has led to fears that extensive learning deficits will be created and educational inequality will be further exacerbated. This paper, therefore, investigates the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on spelling skills (capitalisation, sounds and letters, separate and compound spelling and punctuation) of students in German-speaking countries. For this purpose, we use granular learning process data from an online learning platform for spelling competences with over 1 million solved exercise sets. We compare successful completion of exercise sets before the pandemic and after the first wave of the pandemic and estimate personal competence by a Rasch model. The result shows a loss of competence in 2020 and an increase in inequality in some grade levels and spelling domains. A linear model cannot confirm an overarching loss of competence.

Impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on students’ spelling ability

Research on Education and Media

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

{"article-title":"Impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on students\u2019 spelling ability"}

In order to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, many schools have been closed for several months as of March 2020 in Germany. The unplanned and rapid shift to...

Impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on students’ spelling ability

Published Online: Dec 15, 2022

Page range: 57 - 63

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/rem-2022-0022

Keywords
Spelling, Distance Education, Language Skills, Competence

© 2022 Nathalie Rzepka et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on students’ spelling ability

Published Online: Dec 15, 2022

Page range: 57 - 63

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/rem-2022-0022

KeywordsSpelling, Distance Education, Language Skills, Competence

© 2022 Nathalie Rzepka et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Keywords
Spelling, Distance Education, Language Skills, Competence