Schulbezogene Einstellungen von Kindern aus bildungsfernen Milieus in der Corona-Pandemie

There is widespread consensus that distance learning in lockdown discriminates children and young people from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds in particular. The gap between the privileged and the left-behind, which is already wide open in Germany, is widening more and more as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic. Empirical evidence for this pandemic-related effect is, however, still scarce, and the corresponding studies rarely include students themselves, and even less so those who are taught at schools in challenging situations. This paper reports on a quantitative study of elementary schools in particularly disadvantaged settings during the lockdown in spring 2021. It asks about individual attitudes and learning experiences of students during homeschooling. The goal was not to define a group of adolescents as disadvantaged and thus as disconnected, but to empirically investigate which individual factors, framework conditions, and mechanisms of action lead to some of these students being more successful in learning during the lockdown than others with initially equal starting conditions. The data analyses revealed four stable clusters, which are based on different forms of student agency and show potentials and opportunities to support students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds individually—in homeschooling and in face-to-face teaching.