[Paper Review] Influence of COVID-19 confinement in students performance in higher education

Tania Martín González, M.A. de la Rubia+5 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Apr 20, 2020

Online Learning and Analytics119 citations

TL;DR

The study analyzes 458 students across three subjects in Madrid and finds that COVID-19 confinement had a significant positive effect on student performance, potentially by shifting learning to a more continuous study pattern.

ABSTRACT

This study explores the effects of COVID-19 confinement in the students performance in higher education. Using a field experiment of 458 students from three different subjects in Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain), we study the differences in assessments by dividing students into two groups. The first group (control) corresponds to academic years 2017/2018 and 2018/2019. The second group (experimental) corresponds to students from 2019/2020, which is the group of students that interrupted their face-to-face activities because of the confinement. The results show that there is a significant positive effect of the COVID-19 confinement on students performance. This effect is also significative in activities that did not change their format when performed after the confinement. We find that this effect is significative both in subjects that increased the number of assessment activities and subjects that did not change the workload of students. Additionally, an analysis of students learning strategies before confinement shows that students did not study in a continuous basis. Based on these results, we conclude that COVID-19 confinement changed students learning strategies to a more continuous habit, improving their efficiency. For these reasons, better scores in students assessment are expected due to COVID-19 confinement that can be explained by an improvement in their learning performance.

Motivation & Objective

• Assess the impact of COVID-19 confinement on student performance in higher education.
• Compare performance between pre-confinement cohorts and the confinement cohort.
• Explore whether workload changes influenced the confinement effect.
• Examine students' learning strategies prior to confinement to explain performance changes.

Proposed method

• Field experiment with 458 students across three subjects at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid.
• Divide students into control (years 2017/2018 and 2018/2019) and experimental (2019/2020) groups.
• Measure differences in assessment outcomes between groups.
• Analyze whether changes in assessment activity or workload modulate the confinement effect.
• Assess pre-confinement learning strategies to understand study patterns.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 Does COVID-19 confinement improve student assessment performance compared to prior cohorts?
• RQ2 Is the confinement effect present in subjects with increased assessment activities and in those with unchanged workloads?
• RQ3 Do changes in learning strategies during confinement explain the observed performance changes?
• RQ4 Is there a shift toward more continuous study habits associated with confinement?

Key findings

• Confinement had a significant positive effect on student performance.
• The positive effect persisted even in subjects whose assessment formats did not change after confinement.
• The effect was observed in subjects with both increased and unchanged workloads.
• Pre-confinement data suggest students did not study continuously, implying confinement may have induced a more continuous learning pattern that improved efficiency.