The Experiences of different groups of upper-secondary school students during the COVID-19 pandemic

Námsupplifun ólíkra nemendahópa

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak, which began in the spring of 2020, had a profound impact on education around the world. Schools were closed in the middle of March, and teachers and students had to work from home. In autumn 2020, schoolwork was initially restarted either in the classroom or in a mixture of classroom and remote teaching; however, school buildings were again closed to students after only a few weeks. During those unstable times, the government clearly focused on keeping schools open, not least to protect vulnerable groups (Guðrún Ragnarsdóttir & Storgaard, 2023) thought to be more affected by the pandemic’s adverse effects (UNESCO, 2020b, 2021b).

Upper-secondary schools in Iceland offer a variety of study programmes developed for different levels of qualification, and, likewise, upper-secondary students themselves are a diverse group with different needs who were affected by the pandemic in different ways and to different degrees. Some studies have revealed that students experienced severe anxiety related to the pandemic (Ningsih et al., 2020; Thahir et al., 2021), whereas other studies have shown a decrease in anxiety among students during the pandemic (Ferraro et al., 2020). In the United States, the pandemic widened achievement gaps, increased dropout rates, and impacted students’ well-being (Dorn et al., 2021), and the same might have been the case elsewhere. It remains unclear how students coped with resuming their studies in school buildings and how they experienced returning to the status quo.

This study aimed to examine the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on the education and well-being of upper-secondary school students in Iceland a year after the start of critical disruptions in their education. The study examined the effects on different groups of students to identify which groups felt the most negative effects of the pandemic.

An online questionnaire was administered to students in four upper-secondary schools during spring semester 2021. Three were comprehensive schools, which offer both academic tracks and vocational training, whereas the fourth was a traditional academic school (i.e., grammar school). Of the 1306 participants, 55% were women, 59% were on an academic track, 20% were in vocational training, and 16% were in general uppersecondary education (i.e., offered only in comprehensive schools) due to not meeting the academic requirements for the first two tracks. Participants answered questions about the conditions that they believed affected their learning (e.g., ADHD, dyslexia, anxiety, depression, social anxiety, and physical disability). Subsequent questions were asked about their feelings about returning to traditional learning when schools finally reopened, whether their academic performance was affected by online studies, and whether they experienced more or less anxiety and loneliness in distance education than in traditional classrooms.

The findings reveal the pandemic’s different effects on different groups of students. More women than men reported feeling anxious during distance learning relative to studying in the classroom, and students whose parents had attended college were more likely to report feeling anxious than other students. Distance learning increased loneliness for approximately half of the students surveyed. The loneliness increased significantly more for women than men, but it increased less for students with dyslexia and students whose native language was not Icelandic, relative to other students. More than half of the students, especially ones whose mother tongue was Icelandic or whose parents had college degrees, thought it would be good to return to school; however, students with anxiety, social phobia, depression, or dyslexia were less likely to think so. The findings show that a particular group of students—ones with university-educated parents, with Icelandic as their mother tongue, and without social phobia, depression, anxiety, or dyslexia that interferes with their studies—felt better in traditional education. Those findings prompt important questions about upper-secondary students who do not seem to fit into the conventional secondary education system. Providing that group of students with extra support is critical now that schoolwork has returned to its previous state.